Imprint: Ebury Press
Published: 07/02/2008
ISBN: 9780091913878
Length: 352 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 26mm x 126mm
Weight: 325g
RRP: £7.99
Though born into privilege and inheriting a fortune, Willie Donaldson ended up dying alone in a seedy rented flat, his computer still logged on to a lesbian porn site. To some, he had been one of the great, under-rated comic writers of our time, and to others, a dangerous force of corruption and decadence.
His achievements were significant - he published Sylvia Plath while still at Cambridge, as a producer in the Sixties he staged Beyond the Fringe, and he was later to write the celebrated Henry Root Letters - but not as impressive as his reckless talent for self-destruction. The impresario became a serial bankrupt. The man about town, who had lived with Sarah Miles and been engaged to Carly Simon, ended up as a ponce in a Chelsea brothel. Success as a writer quickly led him into a dark underworld of crack addiction, fraud and sexual obsession. Now friend and collaborator, Terence Blacker unravels the intimate truth of Willie Donaldson's strange story in all its glamour, hilarity and pain.
'What a young fool I was. But how I adored him' Carly Simon
'A slimy crook' Private Eye
'For the skill and wit of his writing he deserves to be hailed as the English Nabokov' Auberon Waugh
'I am someone who always answers the phone at 1.00 am, because I know it isn't going to be my bank manager or the Inland Revenue, but probably a crack dealer or a prostitute' Willie Donaldson
Imprint: Ebury Press
Published: 07/02/2008
ISBN: 9780091913878
Length: 352 Pages
Dimensions: 198mm x 26mm x 126mm
Weight: 325g
RRP: £7.99
A startling and brilliant biography that reads like a Rake's Progress for the 21st century
Once in a blue moon comes a biography that has the texture of life-as-it-is-lived, the usual province of fiction... With stealth and sympathy, the biographer has followed his subject's footsteps into all sorts of strange by-ways, most of them frightening or humiliating or forlorn
Superb... it would be a brilliant picaresque novel, if it were not all true
Utterly gripping... hilarious, heartbreaking
Sympathetic and extremely enjoyable