Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

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If you are not a fan of the Discworld then you may not appreciate all the references made to the books but even as an autobiography of one of the UK's best selling and prolific authors, this is an extremely well written, thoughtful and very personal look at Terry Pratchett's remarkable life and work. However, there would be days, when the mood was right, when Terry would tell me to open the memoir file, and he would do an afternoon on the autobiography, him dictating, me typing. At the point at which we ran out of time, the file had grown to just over 24,000 words, rough-hewn, disjointed, awaiting the essential polish that Terry would never be in a position to give them. He was intending to call the book A Life With Footnotes. Sir Terry is the famous author of the Discworld series (and more). In December 2007, he was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's of all things. It seems especially ironic and tragic that he had this particular illness what with him being a writer, his calling being bringing to life strange worlds and people, living in his own head so to speak - when it is his mind that was to fail him before his body would. So, mostly in the spirit of experiment, the two of them started building a book together. It was a lark, really – a side project with nothing hingeing on it except their own diversion. According to Terry they were “two guys who didn’t have anything to lose by having fun”. They were also two guys who operated at different ends of the day. Neil, at this point in his life, was largely allergic to the morning and would wake around lunchtime to flurries of crisp answerphone messages from his collaborator, which were generally variations on the theme of “Get up, you lazy bastard”.

Where is the option to give this book 10 out of 5? Because, damn, it can't be overstated how good this book is. 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. A truly wonderful and heartbreaking tale, filled with memories typed by Pratchett himself and lovingly woven with those of writer and ‘best PA in the world’ (read the book), Rob Wilkins. The unique humour and storytelling that carries you along in all of the adventure’s in Prattchett’s fiction is present throughout this biography which is filled with characters and situations as colourful and as rich as those from his books, making this a really enjoyable read.He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. At sixty-six, Terry had 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. This is desperately moving. It's a biography of Terry Pratchett, one which makes it clear he was not the friendly grandpa people assumed because of the hat/humour/twinkly eyes. He was thin skinned, and prone to grumpiness and indeed spectacular rage, and basically was human with human failings. On the showing of this he was also a very decent person, unspoiled by wealth, who conducted his personal life well and wrote terrific books and was passionately interested in a massive variety of things and people. Flabbergastingly, there were also quite some history lessons in this book. I, for example, had not known there was a nuclear incident scaled 5-out-of-7 in Pennsylvania in the 70s (as a European, I mostly heard about Chernobyl and the much later incident at Fukushima but not much else). It’s this kind of added value that make this shine even brighter. Lively and affectionate, this is not a critical biography, but nor is it sycophantic. It shows Pratchett as brilliant and generous, but also cantakerous, with a ruthless sense of the ridiculous. i News

I loved learning about the author's days in school - thereby getting quite the history lesson, too - and of his struggles before he became an avid reader. Equally, I was delighted to meet all the other family members and discovering quite a number of people who seemed intrinsically familiar ... because they definitely were the inspiration for certain people on Discworld! :D However, his years spent as a journalist of one sort or another and the people he thereby met was quite astonishing as well.Most of all, though, it was as lovely as it was sometimes surprising to take such an intimate look at Sir Terry and his loved ones, how they experienced certain milestones and forged a good life together. Surprising because one has a certain idea about a person that is never complete and the truth is sometimes, well, surprising. *lol* Rob may not have come into Terry's life until much later but this was being worked on before he was taken from us for too soon and we are given insights by his friends, family and former work colleagues to give us a book that is bursting with detail that it could almost have been completely written by the man himself. So I thank you Rob for this wonderful book. I wept at the beginning. I wept at the end. I cried for all the characters I'll miss and those I never got to meet. People knowing Pratchett and his works also know that Wilkins has been working for and living with the Pratchetts for years, before the diagnosis even. They had a kind of symbiosis going and it shows in this book.

Transworld managing director Larry Finlay says: ‘ A Life with Footnotes captures the genius that was Terry Pratchett, with warmth, poignancy, and great good humour - and with no small amount of love. It's an intimate, engaging and revealing portrait of one of the UK’s most loved and most missed authors, that only Rob Wilkins could have written. It is a masterclass in great biographical writing.’

The Sydney Morning Herald

Everyone who is a Discworld fan has their favourite character. I have too many to mention but I'd like to mention The Luggage because that is the point (in the very first Discworld "The Colour of Magic") that I fell in love with all things Pratchett. Talking of humanity, I loved reading that his wife “Lyn’s strongest and most abiding first impression of Terry was of his kindness.” At the time of his death in 2015, award-winning and bestselling author Sir Terry Pratchett was working on his finest story yet - his own. And I listened to some music that was new to me after reading that Neil Gaiman was singing “the first lines of ‘Shoehorn with Teeth’ – his and Terry’s favourite They Might Be Giants song.” A deeply moving and personal portrait of the extraordinary life of Sir Terry Pratchett, written with unparalleled insight and filled with funny anecdotes, this is the only official biography of one of our finest authors.