Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

Product Information

Pratchett fans will no doubt be thrilled to learn more about his early days as a journalist and his groundbreaking work in the world of comic fantasy, as well as his later struggles with Alzheimer's disease and his tireless advocacy for assisted dying. But even readers who are less familiar with Pratchett's oeuvre will find much to appreciate in this book, which offers a touching and nuanced portrait of a man who made a profound impact on the world around him. And Wilkins clearly loved him, having been not just an employee but a friend and eventually, with the “embuggerance”, also often a caretaker. And yet his view of Terry is not that of starry-eyed admiration but a realistic one, with the down-to-earth admiration and sometimes tolerance and at times friendly exasperation. It’s both heartbreaking and funny, bittersweet and joyful — all at the same time. He doesn’t sugarcoat Terry at his highs or his lows, and that conveys the feeling of seeing a closeup of a real, complex person.

Drawing on his own extensive memories, along with those of Terry’s family, friends, fans and colleagues, Rob recounts Terry’s extraordinary story – from his early childhood to the literary phenomenon that his Discworld series became; and how he met and coped with the challenges that ‘The Embuggerance’ of Alzheimer’s brought with it. At the age of six, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. Terry lived a life full of achievements, becoming one of the UK’s bestselling writers, winning The Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Fond, funny and conveys a pitch-perfect sense of how Pratchett managed to take the elements of his 1950s working-class childhood . . . and turn it into a universe of limitless richness and invention. Mail on SundayTalking of humanity, I loved reading that his wife “Lyn’s strongest and most abiding first impression of Terry was of his kindness.” I may be overwhelmed by indecision when asked to name anything as my absolute favorite (choices, there are just too many), unless you ask me who my favorite writer is. There is no hesitation there. It’s Terry Pratchett. Indisputably so.

His wit, indeed sparkling as it was, and his intelligence was plain to see from what he had written, up until the very (rather bitter) end. The only reason I read this book was because it was about PTerry and it only felt right that I should. After taking a walk with Death in 2015 due to a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease, the mantle of completing Terry’s memoir was passed to Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, close companion and now head guardian of Terry Pratchett’s literary estate.

Select a format:

Lively and affectionate, this is not a critical biography, but nor is it sycophantic. It shows Pratchett as brilliant and generous, but also cantankerous, with a ruthless sense of the ridiculous. Wilkins recalls wearing a suit to accompany Pratchett to a publishers’ meeting. Sir Terry christened the look “the under-manager” and ribbed Wilkins so mercilessly on the drive up that Wilkins stopped to buy new clothes. It was fun reading about the Discworld Conventions. At one in Liverpool, “the available food included what was widely agreed to have been one of the last servings of that dying culinary phenomenon, the Great British Curry, complete with obligatory sultanas, and there was something jelly-based for pudding.” Writing was mostly what he did. There isn't a huge amount to sustain a biography in the usual way of things. There is, however, the Embuggerance: this brilliant author's horrifically early slide into dementia via a particularly virulent form of Alzheimers that took away his memories, his ability to make connections, his words. It was this fear that drove him to put up on the wall of his office a large picture of WH Smith’s book-pulping machine. It was there, he said, to remind him to write a better book.