ALL TOGETHER NOW PREVIEW: Hot Press looks back on Will Self's literary career in the limelight

With a writing style which seeks to “disturb readers’ fundamental assumptions” about the world, 56-year old Will Self is a unique character. Alongside writing award-nominated books about mental illness and debilitation, he spent his twenties appearing on British TV shows such as Question Time and Have I Got News For You. He was named one of the ’20 Best Young British Novelists’ in the ’90s at which time he had a parallel career penning acerbic columns in national newspapers. This phase of his professional life culminated in an incident in which he was caught using heroin in Prime Minister John Major’s private jet while covering the 1997 UK General Election for The Observer. When Hot Press met him in 2000, he’d worked hard on getting clean, but he was typically to-the-point in conversation.

“I don’t really have any more of a relationship with heroin than I do with LSD, mescaline, ketamine, MDMA, amphetamine, crystal meth, marijuana, alcohol, magic mushrooms, cocaine, any drug you care to mention,” he told us. “In the context of being clean and sober, I don’t have a defined relationship with any of these drugs, because I don t take them.”

Since quitting drugs, Self has consistently confronted the fallacy that addiction is part of the journey to artistic enlightenment.

“While it’s quite possible to say that your first five or 10 joints or your first five or 10 whiskeys or your first five or 10 of anything may produce interesting and illuminating insights, it’s very difficult to see what the next five or ten thousand add to that insight.”

Self’s exploration of the nature of drugs was on the agenda again when we met him in 2004, following the publication of his collection of short stories, Doctor Mukti and Other Tales Of Woe. This time however, he was confronting the psycho-pharmacology dominance within the health industry.

“We put these people (psychologies and therapists) on a pedestal,” he told us. Take a phenomenon like Attention Deficit Disorder. Now I’m not saying it doesn’t exist in one way, shape or form, but it’s a wave that spreads east across to us from the States, you have thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of kids taking Ritalin who may just be rather bouncy kids, and it’s a diagnosis that falls disproportionately on socio-economically disadvantaged families.

“You’re much less likely to be ADD if you’re in a good income bracket because your parents will get you out in the fresh air more. So what you have here is a kind of collusion between a society that wishes to see itself as mentally ill, or possessed of personality disorders, and the psychiatrists are like guys who’ve got a quick-fit exhaust centre, and suddenly everybody says, ‘I need a new exhaust’.”

Fast-forward to 2012, when a more mature Self embarked on an ambitious stylistic shift with Booker-nominated novel Umbrella. It was a work which embraced a stream-of-consciousness style, which led to a difficult, but rewarding, end result.

“At times you don’t know if someone is describing a thought or an action. But stream of consciousness feels like the only honest way to write,” he said.

“Right now we’re sitting here in this hotel and talking. You are not sitting and looking at yourself reflexively. You don’t experience your life like a story. This phase of his career spawned a further two novels, Shark and Phone, which formed part of a compelling modernist trilogy and ended in 2017. Since then, Self has continued to write and work extensively.

In recent months, he has recorded short stories for the BBC Radio 4, written about his experiences with LSD, hosted illuminating live discussion panels – where he addresses topics such as Brexit, Trump, the rise of populism and the EU – and spoken about the disarray of the left-wing in our society when compared to the rise of the far right. Whatever’s on the agenda for his appearance at All Together Now festival, you can be sure he’ll bring all of his forthright personality, caustic wit and searing intelligence with him… Not to me missed.

Will Self appears at All Together Now's All Curious Minds stage on Saturday 4. More details here: https://www.alltogethernow.ie/