Word Monkey (Hardcover)

Product Description

Christopher Fowler’s first memoir, Paperboy, told the story of a bookworm growing up in a house where there was nothing to read but knitting pamphlets and motorcycle manuals – a theme that was gradually crowded out by the exploits of his improbable family.

5 years later he published a second volume, Film Freak, about his attempts to forge a career in the British film industry in the 70s just as it was going down the pan. His accounts of dodgy producers, basement dives and dreadful B movies were elbowed to one side – this time by the exploits of his improbable friends.

Chris had always intended to write a third memoir – about how he became a writer and managed to maintain a sort-of career in popular fiction without – as he put it – going completely mad. But his previous autobiographical experiences meant he was wary of what might happen if he attempted to. So he made a promise to himself: that nothing would be allowed to divert him from this path, and he set to work.

But Chris hadn’t reckoned on this memoir being subject to interference on an altogether different scale.

Because while Word Monkey is about writing and what being a writer has meant to him, woven into the narrative is an altogether darker, more intensely personal thread: that of someone having to confront their own mortality. Because in Spring 2020, as the world went into lockdown, Chris was diagnosed with terminal cancer. In prose as light as air, he recounts what he knows – we know – will be the final chapter in his personal story.

It’s heartbreakingly sad but, to borrow the title of Abi Morgan’s bestseller, ‘this is not a pity memoir’ because this is a book by Christopher Fowler, it’s insightful, it’s moving and it is, of course, tearfully funny.