Will Self - Early Life

Early Life

Self was born and raised in what he describes as the "effortlessly dull" North London suburb of East Finchley, although he sometimes lays claim to Hampstead Garden Suburb. His "intellectually snobbish parents" were Peter Self, Professor of Public Administration at the London School of Economics, and Elaine (Rosenbloom), an American from Queens in New York, who worked as a publisher's assistant. His father was from an Anglican family and his mother was Jewish. His paternal grandfather, with working class origins in Fulham, was a high-ranking civil servant and Chairman of the Lay Association of the Church of England, who ended his career as Chairman of the Electricity Board. Self is a paternal descendant of minister Nathaniel Woodard, entombed in Lancing College, hence his middle name. Self spent some time growing up in America. His parents separated when he was nine, and divorced when he was eighteen. Despite the intellectual encouragement given by his parents, Self was an emotionally confused and self-destructive child, harming himself with cigarette ends and knives before getting into drugs.

Self was a voracious reader from a young age. At ten an interest in science fiction grew, with notable works such as Frank Herbert's Dune, J. G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick reflecting the precociousness of Self's reading. Into his teenage years, Self claimed to have been "overawed by the canon", stifling his ability to express himself. Nevertheless, Self's dabbling with drugs grew in step with his prolific reading. Self started smoking marijuana at the age of twelve, graduating through amphetamines, cocaine, and acid to heroin, which he started injecting at eighteen.

Self attended University College School, an independent school for boys in Hampstead in North London. He later attended Christ's College, Finchley, from where he went to Exeter College at Oxford University, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating with a third class degree. His reasons for reading PPE rather than English literature were discussed by Self in an interview with The Guardian newspaper:

I a pretty thorough grounding in the canon, but I certainly didn't want to be involved with criticism. Even then it seemed inimical to what it was to be a writer, which is what I really wanted to be.

Of Self's background Nick Rennison has written that he:

is sometimes presented as a bad-boy outsider, writing, like the Americans William S Burroughs and Hubert Selby Jr, about sex, drugs and violence in a very direct way. Yet he is not some class warrior storming the citadels of the literary establishment from the outside, but an Oxford educated, middle-class metropolitan who, despite his protestations to the contrary in interviews, is about as much at the heart of the establishment as you can get, a place he has occupied almost from the start of his career.