Will Self at Wolverhampton Literature Festival – review
Memory tests and an intellectual debate helped to bring deep thoughts and feelings about fiction to life.
Author, journalist and personality Will Self joined Wolverhampton Literature Festival to add his own unique perspective to the idea of memories brought forward by novels.
He and Professor Sebastian Groes and Dr Tom Mercer from Wolverhampton University led a discussion on the intricacies of remembering fiction and how perspectives change when stories are reread later in life.
The event, which was co-organised by BBC Arts, Wolverhampton Literature Festival and the Groes’ Art and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Novel Perceptions, started with an interactive experiment by Dr Mercer.
The experiment asked those in attendance to answer questions on their thoughts and feelings and memories of "1984", "To kill a mockingbird" and a novel of their own choice, for which I chose "Primary Colors".
After Dr Mercer discussed the conclusions of the study of the 150 people in attendance and how it fit with the research project, Professor Groes spoke to Will Self about his own novel history and his memoir "Will: A memoir".
Memories
Mr Self spoke about his experiences with reading Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" 44 years ago and how books bring up certain memories, telling the story of a man who said his book had really affected him, but who then couldn't remember the title.
He said the memoir came from working on different pieces and realising that it was time to offer something different to the market, describing it as a piece of "auto-fiction" with emotional authenticity.
He also did a reading from the beginning of his memoir, reading about his own heroin addiction and existential crisis at the age of 26 from a third person perspective.
Intellectual and verbose, yet happy to take it down to a level of vulgar detail when needed, he painted in intimate detail and heavy imagery the details of a person strung out on heroin in the early 1980s.
He also said the memoir was presented in the third person as he felt using it as his own recollection was spurious and pride attempting to win, whereas it worked better to talk about a character instead of himself.
A question and answer session asked questions about emotional attachment to novels, the resistance to difficultly in writing and how humour and horror resonates more with memories in fiction.
An intellectual and high brow conversation with much for those in attendance to take home and think about around fiction and the emotions people attach to it.
