Will Self has bone marrow cancer—it’s been a hard few years, with some near-death moments. “I’ve been fantastically ill,” Self says over Zoom from his London home. “It’s liminal and ongoing.” The outspoken and singular British author, known for producing experimental modernist fiction, was diagnosed with secondary myelofibrosis in 2022 and has been in and out of the hospital ever since. “People are in denial about their own death,” he states. “There’s no point in being sympathetic to me. It’s your turn next.”
Self says he routinely feels like he’s being made to stand in front of a firing squad, only to be pardoned by doctors at the last possible moment. “I said to my clinician, this is voodoo and you’re the Baron Samedi because every few weeks you dig me up and say, ‘You’re alive again.’ ” In the midst of his health struggles, Self—who has lost much of his ability to walk—continues to write fiction. “I’m fascinated by death,” he notes. “I certainly wasn’t going to let my own mortal illness put me off.”
A cultural polymath with an audacious linguistic flair and a booming laugh, Self produces satirical and complex works—about psychiatry, technology, mortality, addiction, psychogeography, and societal decay—that take unexpected narrative turns. He’s the author of more than two dozen books, including The Quantity Theory of Insanity, his 1991 debut story collection; Will, a 2019 memoir about his struggles with drugs; and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2012. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, according to his publisher, Grove Atlantic.
Self’s innovative new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality, out in March from Grove Press, is an excoriating satire of the English middle class and the Anglo-European liberal elite that’s centered on a group of incestuous middle-aged London friends. They include Will, a polarizing author, who narrates some of the book; Teddy, a cancer survivor; and Phil, a troubled figure whose death in the first chapter highlights how little these friends actually care about one another. As the story unfolds, the friends bed-hop, vacation, and backstab, and discuss their inane business ventures and charities.
The idiosyncratic book has an unorthodox structure and hallucinatory feel—some scenes reappear across multiple chapters with slightly different details, as Self plays with the idea that life for his characters is a derivative affair, with the same conversations occurring on a loop. In some sections, characters’ penis sizes are listed (like measurements of worth), genders aren’t fixed (several characters transition from male to female midbook), and death isn’t final. Along the way, Self movingly reflects on his mortality and highlights the vulgarities of a society in which dog funerals are better attended than human ones and antisemitism and racial profiling are normalized.
Self—who counts James Joyce and J.G. Ballard among his influences—wrote The Quantity Theory of Morality over a three-month period, while his health was failing. “I was on loads of steroids,” he says. “I’m some kind of a crazy genius. I wrote it with cancer in 12 weeks.” He describes the novel as “an important book about the slide into blissful extremism,” adding, “If people find it funny, good. It’ll soften them up for the punch in the gut that I hope they feel when they finish reading it.”
Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove Atlantic, puts Self in a category with Vladimir Nabokov, Don DeLillo, and Toni Morrison. “Will is a towering giant of a writer,” Entrekin says. “I love him. His new book is a culmination of nearly four decades of incredible work. Watching a brilliant artist confront his mortality is very powerful. It’s emotional to talk about.”
Self, 64, was born and raised in London, an asocial kid who would sometimes read six books in a week. “I might have been an autistic savant,” he says. “I do seem odd to myself, even now.” Self’s father was English and his mother, who had mental health issues, was Jewish American—and a source of fascination for the author, whose 2024 novel, Elaine, was inspired by her diaries.
As a teen, Self was every parent’s nightmare: he smoked pot at 12 and began shooting heroin at 17 or 18, developing a drug addiction that lasted two decades. After graduating from Oxford University at age 20, where he studied philosophy,
politics, and economics, he wrote The Quantity Theory of Insanity and promptly became a literary star, which exacerbated his drug use. “I had to grease my head to get through a door, I was so inflated with my self-opinion,” he recalls.
The onetime enfant terrible of British literature—who’s been married three times and has four kids—achieved infamy in 1997 when he was busted for doing drugs on then–prime minister John Major’s plane while on assignment for the Observer. He got sober at 38 and says he “kind of went mad” in his 40s and started composing more challenging novels, including the stream-of-consciousness trilogy Umbrella, Shark, and Phone, which don’t have paragraph or chapter breaks. “I’m proud of myself,” he says. “I killed my career for art.”
James Wills, Self’s agent, calls the author “the last literary man standing,” an uncompromising talent and true original who upends narrative conventions. Critics have at times dismissed Self as being too difficult to read—a label Self pushes back against. “If people call it difficulty, I call it a lack of aspiration,” he says.
There’s never a dull moment in a Will Self book—or in a conversation with him. Peter Blackstock, Self’s editor, points out that he speaks the way he writes and is captivating to listen to. Self is mostly housebound now, but his dazzling mind keeps churning, and he isn’t short on opinions or hot takes. “We live in a deeply inauthentic and unfeeling culture,” he says, “filled with phony kids who’ve stopped reading books.” He adds that the publishing industry has “gone up the wazoo and carries on like a Potemkin village.”
Still, Self’s belief in literature endures. “My values are art and love, not money and power,” he says. He has tremors in his hands and can no longer type, and is composing two new books using a voice recorder. He’s passionate, bighearted, and deeply cares about his connection with readers. “I don’t socialize with anyone anymore and haven’t for some time, but it’s fine, because the communication through the text is so pure, so brilliant. Who would want to do anything else but that?”
