Laura Potter 

My body & soul

Will Self, writer, 48, on surviving a car crash, admiring drugs from afar, and living life intensely
  
  

Will Self in Edinburgh
Will Self at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Photograph: Murdo Macleod Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Are you healthy? I have the same sign on my office door that Field Marshal Montgomery had outside his tent during the desert campaign; it reads "I am 99% fit, are you?" I've always been pretty fit. Even when I was a heroin addict I was a fit heroin addict.

Any notable accidents? I had a very serious car crash – a three-car shunt on Chelsea Bridge. I wasn't badly hurt (I had a broken collarbone), but the best thing about it was that nobody else was hurt. The police said it was the most extreme accident they'd ever seen on the bridge and were amazed nobody had been killed.

Do you worry about your weight? For a period I was morbidly obese. I went out with a feeder – she got a weird sexual kick out of feeding me up.

How much do you drink? I stopped drinking soon after that car accident, so I haven't drunk since 1984. I was very obviously an alcoholic-level drinker. The way that I cope with giving up is by keeping a large glass of crème de menthe by me at all times, so if I want to have it I can. It's a strange mind trick.

What's your attitude to smoking? Positive. I've given up smoking probably more than anyone else alive; every time I stub a cigarette out I'm certain it'll be my last, and I think it's that positive frame of mind that's really helped. When's the last time I had a cigarette? I'm smoking now, but it's definitely the last one I'm ever going to have.

And your attitude to drugs? I admire them from afar. I think the heavier hallucinogens are amazing. The problem with our society is there aren't enough positive drug rituals. I said this to the Archbishop of Canterbury the other night – the Church of England should introduce some sort of ecstasy communion.

Are you happy? Everybody that knows me knows that I grab life and live it with a furious poetic intensity.

Have you ever taken an antidepressant? I've taken major tranquillisers over the years, but I stopped because they were repressing my creative drive. Many psychiatrists said to me that my ebullient nature was in some way morbid and unhealthy.★

Psycho Too by Will Self is published by Bloomsbury at £15

 

Leave a Comment

Required fields are marked *

*

*