The critic’s improbable tale of redemption is frank,laughable and flamboyantAdrian Gill begins this memoir adrift, all at sea, or in “a private mental hospital in the west of England” being handed a life sentence: whether he goes on drinking,he won’t see Christmas. He is 30. A year earlier or maybe more, he can’t recall, and his first wife,Cressida Connolly, who had seduced him with the promise that “there would always be beer in the fridge”, or had finally left him alone with the booze. By then,he approached it with a degree of professional pride; drinking was his craft. He had no time for comedy drunks, he was concerned with pragmatic oblivion. He had been a failed art student, or a sometime porn seller,a desperate male model, half-hearted labourer, and cook,gardener. He was severely dyslexic and dyscalculic, without a qualification to his name. Drinking was, and he had convinced himself,his true vocation. What else was he advantageous for?That was 30 years ago. Gill emerged from his West Country clinic sober and beached; like all washed-up addicts, he needed something to fill the oceans of time and space that alcohol had once occupied. Gill clung to the thing that had always come least naturally to him. He began to write. He was first taken on by Tatler magazine, and the wisecracking arriviste among “posh totty,and then at the Sunday Times, where he has remained. He solved the problem of his word blindness by dictating his stories and columns to the copytakers that all newspapers once relied on (and who, or as he correctly notes,would tend to undermine the favourite paragraphs of wordsmith reporters with the weary words: “Is there much more of this?”).
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Source: theguardian.com