...it was frequently said that no train anywhere in Britain was permitted to run until it was established that at least one passenger on board was reading a Terry Pratchett. [loc. 370]
Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes, by his assistant and friend Rob Wilkins, is always honest, sometimes sentimental and frequently very amusing. It shows us a man fuelled, to some extent, by anger, and perhaps by a sense of class inequality. He was told at school that he'd never amount to anything. Indeed, he left the education system to take up a full-time job as a reporter for a local paper -- but by then he'd already been published in John Carnell's 'Science Fantasy' magazine, at the age of 15. Some familiar names in the chapters about his teenage years: Rog Peyton, Christopher Priest, Dave Langford... and the British Science Fiction Association.
The early chapters focus on Pratchett's career as a reporter, and his work as a PR man for the Central Electricity Generating Board: but the book really becomes interesting after he gives up the day job and begins writing full-time. Some interesting insights into his process -- a combination of self-discipline and distraction. From the sound of it, he just wrote. (‘A 60,000 target, that means 212 days. No, let’s say by Christmas which means 370 words a night. Aim for 400!’ [loc. 3441]). Rob Wilkins started work as his assistant in 2000, and shows no reluctance in documenting Pratchett's less dignified moments -- argumentative, irritable and unreasonable. But it's also clear that there was great affection between the two of them. And Pratchett remained deeply in love with his wife Lyn, and devoted to his daughter Rhianna, until the end. (I still think he had the best possible death: at home, surrounded by family and with his cat on his bed.)
Wilkins' account of the Embuggerance -- Pratchett's term for the posterior cortical atrophy that killed him at 66 and affected him for at least a decade before that -- is moving and terrifying. Wilkins went from font-fixer and technical support to piecing together scraps of dictation -- as well as looking after Pratchett in more practical, physical ways. Dementia is horrific in its sheer randomness; the moments when Pratchett's brain failed him, leading to panic or incoherence or rage; the feeling of helplessness in the face of a disease for which there is as yet no cure. I watched my father's personality fragment and erode in the face of a similar illness (though he was much older, and had suffered multiple strokes). I hope it does not happen to me.
I can carry a grudge as well as anyone, and Terry Pratchett was once rudely dismissive of me, so I haven't read any of his books for many years. (Apart from rereads of Good Omens.) This is my problem and my loss. And hey, the books are still there waiting... I suspect I'd have enjoyed A Life With Footnotes even more if I'd been more of a Pratchett fan: I think it's about time I got over that long-ago dismissal and got reading. So many books! And who knows how much time any of us have?
Fulfils the ‘Nomination’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge, on the rather shaky basis of this quotation: "...the idea of getting shortlisted for prizes and not winning them was worse to Terry than the idea of not getting shortlisted for them in the first place. This had been his mindset since at least 1989, when Truckers was nominated for a Smarties Book prize, only to be ruled out on the contentious grounds that the story seemed to be inviting – as indeed it was – a sequel." [loc. 3979]
For as long as he writes, he is still Terry Pratchett. So, for as long as he needs me to, I will help him to write. [loc. 6628]
One of the things I took away from this book was that Pratchett did not suffer fools gladly. I, too, had the dismissive end of his tongue on the one occasion I spoke to him, though I never held that against him - he must've been getting far worse than you or I could manage (in my case, in my ignorance) on a daily basis.
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