Friday, May 22, 2015

Will Self's 'amanuensis' to publish memoir of working for the novelist

Matthew De Abaitua’s Self & I covers the six-month period he spent reading, drinking and rolling ‘special cigarettes’ as assistant to the Booker-shortlisted author in the early 1990s

Will Self in 1997.
Quite intense ... Will Self in 1997. Photograph: Bleddyn Butcher/Rex Features
From an interview involving shooting whisky bottles and smoking “special” cigarettes to an attempt to take a short cut through Sizewell’s nuclear power stations, the novelist Matthew De Abaitua is set to lift the curtain on the six months he spent as Will Self’s amanuensis in Suffolk 20 years ago.

De Abaitua’s memoir Self & I has just been acquired by Aardvark Bureau, a new imprint at independent publisher Gallic Books, which will publish it next May. It details the half-year period in the early 1990s when De Abaitua worked as a live-in assistant for Self: at the time, the novelist had just published My Idea of Fun, while De Abaitua was 21, and had recently completed the creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia.
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