30/10/18: Matthew De Abaitua – Self & I: A Memoir of Literary Ambition (2018)

Fascinating. Matthew De Abaitua worked as Will Self’s live-in assistant in a remote Suffolk cottage. Self acts as an inspiration and sort of mentor for the author’s own literary aspirations. The memoir flits between the time in the cottage (much of it spent alone while Self was travelling) and other episodes from his life. It’s a hybrid of autobiography, literary criticism and social history – a real window into how different life was in the 1990s, the last era before the dominance of the internet.