The novelist Will Self sees the world through his mind rather than his eyes. A disclaimer in his freewheeling new memoir points out that although the names of some real people are used, they "appear in fictionalised settings that are manifestly a product of the narrator's delusions".
Take Sherman Oaks, a boy Self says he grew up with, although Self reached 6ft 4in tall while Oaks only made it to 3ft 3in. The adult Oaks now puts huge statues of himself all around the world; even the "life-sized ones" along Hadrian's Wall are six feet tall. "These aren't me," he insists, "the point is that the body forms are archetypes – they are everyman."
Self is not an everyman. He has a brain stuffed with arcane literature, but also one that has been subjected to almost 50 years of abuse of various kinds. He claims to have lost months talking to his Los Angeles therapist (who naturally videoed his clients in an effort to break into the movie business). Some of these stories are so tall one can almost feel the oxygen thinning. Nonetheless, Self delivers them with his customary ribaldry and manic erudition.
