Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes: The Official Biography by Rob Wilkins

Bjørn reviews Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes: The Official Biography by Rob Wilkins.

‘People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.’

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.

At six years old, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything.

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.

Following his untimely death from Alzheimer’s disease, the mantle of completing Terry’s memoir was passed to Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the author’s literary estate.

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.

“He wasn’t being entirely metaphorical, many years later, when he described himself in interviews as ‘hallucinating gently for a living’. He seems to have discovered very quickly that there were things within things, worlds within worlds, wholly visible, practically tangible, and certainly available for story-telling.”

It has taken me 1.5 years to get to the book – which I bought about a week after I found out it existed. Because I was afraid. I had no idea what a Rob Wilkins was, precious. And Sir Terry Pratchett might be dead, if evil people and newspapers and all those lies are to be believed, but he remains my favourite author. Finally, I bit that bullet, shiny and golden, and decided the review was going to be nothing but glowing praise.

I finished reading.

I then thought a lot.

I re-read the book.

I then thought even more.

Finally, I decided to review it, otherwise I wouldn’t get to it until my own death.

Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes is really a three-part book. The first part are Sir Terry’s own memories, possibly somewhat improved (too good to check – absolutely). The second – Rob Wilkins’ memoir from the years he has spent working as Pratchett’s assistant. The third: the embuggerance.

The first part takes a good half of the book and is an absolute winner. I was worried that Wilkins would try to be ‘the new Pratchett’ and develop his own cringe-y humorous tone the Master wouldn’t want to use as loo roll. It’s just right. It sounds like Pratchett. (A lot of this book is based on the recordings of Sir Terry’s memories – many of them, possibly, quoted in verbatim.) His childhood sounds like Calvin & Hobbes without Hobbes. Terry doesn’t seem to have friends, but doesn’t mind; he has his father, a mechanic, who encourages the boy to develop his nerdy skills, helps him, invites him to do things together. The boy has a telescope, an album of cards with images of planets on, and books – although, hard as it is to imagine, initially he struggles with both reading and writing. 

The specific book that changes things for the boy Terry is Wind in the Willows. I actually gasped at that. Wind in the Willows is one of the first books I remember from my own childhood. Those memories are almost like a manual to creating a Terry Pratchett. I’ve learned how he happened and I loved every single page, paragraph, sentence. The humour is where and as it should be. It’s perfect.

As hard as it is to imagine, Pratchett struggled for a very long time before becoming successful. The Colour of Magic has been released when its author was 35; The Light Fantastic would take three more years. Much earlier, “head teacher […] thought ‘he could tell how successful you were going to be in later life by how well you could read or write at the age of six’.” That head teacher should have perhaps pulled his head out of his arse before the age of six, but I digress. (Have I mentioned Sir Terry is my favourite author ever?) Before there were books, there were short stories; Pratchett was Uncle Jim at Bucks Free Press (glamorous AF) and Patrick Kearns at a ‘regional newspaper’ – I believe those stories are collected in the only, so far, posthumous release bearing the name Terry Pratchett on the cover, A Stroke of the Pen. I decided not to read that book, although apparently it’s a really good trip up the memory lane, showing how Pratchett became Pratchett. I trust Rhianna Pratchett curated it very well, and while Sir Terry specified he didn’t want any more books to be made of the notes he had left behind, those are – well, old, and not notes expanded by other people.

We’ll get to those.

The Carpet People bombed in 1971. The Dark Side of the Sun and Strata did pretty much the same respectively five and ten years later. In the meantime, Pratchett worked as a Press Officer whose tasks involved coverage of three nuclear plants (I mean… obvious choice of the right person for the right job), where he continued until the fourth Discworld book – Mort – finally convinced him that he could make a living out of this book stuff. I have never grown to like the first two, The Colour of Magic and The Land Fantastic – and Sir Terry as good as disowned them himself, telling the readers not to read the series in order. 

I’ve learned a lot from this Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. I squealed every time I noticed we shared a trait. Pratchett and I shared certain interests, to only mention being computer geeks and love for nature. We also shared a certain opinion, which I will talk about once I get past the 82% of this review (note to self: limit the word count to 10 thousand words). The anecdotes, tales of his job and workmates, humble – no, really – beginnings are diamonds. (At that point I was trying to decide whether my final score would be more 9.5 out of 10 rounded up to 5 for Queen’s Book Asylum, or just the obvious 10 out of 10.) As Irish Independent noted in its review, the book is “more a collection of fan notes than a serious biography.” DUDE. (The reviewer’s a dude.) Have you heard of Sir Terry Pratchett? Or of his fans? I bought this book for the fan notes that I would otherwise never know about.

[Forcibly stops self from quoting half of the book instead of reviewing it]

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The second part is Wilkins’s memoir describing the amazing and not-so-amazing sides to being Pratchett’s assistant. (The story of how Sir Terry decided he needed an assistant in the first place is gold itself.) Not all of it is a hagiography; Pratchett was capable of throw-away cruelty towards his friends and people whose livelihoods depended on his whims. There’s envy (H*rry P*tt*r is the official spelling, never forget), anger at the reviewers treating his books like some sort of kiddie stuff, then mortification when it turns out that he had, after all, committed the crime of Literature. He loved his fans and interacting with them; not so much the bookstores. The Discworld books show up increasingly briefly, which isn’t a shocker, since there are 41 of them. More space is dedicated to Pratchett’s other writings; in particular Nation, which Sir Terry considered his most important book ever. I felt that the first half was exactly as it should have been, then there was a part with too much Wilkins – not that it’s his fault, how is he supposed to write about being Pratchett’s assistant without talking about being his assistant? – and then…

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“[T]he gloom began to fill up with people. Mostly they stood by themselves, or sat on chairs. Some wandered around quietly. They passed a man in ancient clothing who was staring at his own hand as though he was seeing it for the first time.

There was another woman swaying gently and singing a nonsense song in a quiet, little girl voice. She gave Roland a strange, mad smile as he walked past. Right behind her stood a bogle.

‘All right,’ said Roland grimly. ‘Now tell me what they do.’

‘They eat yer memories,’ said Rob Anybody. ‘Yer thoughts is real tae them. Wishes an’ hope are like food! They’re vermin, really.”

(Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett)

Wintersmith came out in 2006; Pratchett wouldn’t be diagnosed with ‘having had a minor stroke a few years before’ until August 2007, before, in December, he’d find out and reveal the true embuggerance was early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Apparently, people whose brains are slowly eaten by Alzheimer’s disease notice the first signs early – detailed tests can reveal the beginnings of the cognitive difficulties up to eight years before the sufferer begins to qualify as having Alzheimer’s. Did Pratchett know? That’s not something the biography can tell, or anybody else, not even Death. It’s just that Wintersmith… well, see the quote above.

In 2017, a posthumous documentary, Terry Pratchett: Back in Black was released. Rob Wilkins was interviewed: “We had a good day [in late 2014] working on the biography and he said to me: ‘Rob, Terry Pratchett is dead.’ Completely out of the blue. I said: ‘Terry look at the words you have written today. It is fantastic.’ And he said: ‘No, no. Terry Pratchett is dead.’” This is not mentioned in Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes; ‘Terry Pratchett is dead’ turned out to be a fragment of a letter written by Pratchett five months before his death, and handed to Wilkins to be opened when the time comes. (The documentary was aired five years before the book’s publication, and human memory is not to be trusted – even without Alzheimer’s.) So, five months before his death, Pratchett did know. He was also ‘writing’ The Shepherd’s Crown – a book he wouldn’t live to see.

Because of the embuggerance.

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On December 11, 2007, Pratchett posted on his official website:

THE EMBUGGERANCE

Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news.  I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early

onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom “stroke”.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism.  For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I

expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers.  Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)

The fucking embuggerance was difficult to believe. My hero shouldn’t be getting Alzheimer’s. That was just unjust and wrong. He would remain alive for ten more years, though. Well. Sort of alive.

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Raising Steam (2013), the penultimate book with the name ‘Terry Pratchett’ on the cover listed as that of the author, was originally panned by the early readers. Wilkins:

“I was in Florida, taking a short holiday, when Raising Steam came out. I was sick with anxiety about what readers were going to think of it. Hunched under the duvet in my villa, I looked at the early reviews on Amazon. And right away my worst fears were realized. I scrolled down: one-star review, two-star review, one-star review … ‘The characters aren’t themselves … the writing is different … not like Pratchett’s previous work … not interesting, not funny, not Pratchett.’ I closed the laptop and pulled the duvet over my head.

“Within 48 hours, fans would come rushing to Terry’s defence, never prepared to stand by and see him slated, least of all now, and the book’s ratings got boosted to 4.6.” 

Lyn and Rhianna Pratchett are nearly absent from the biography. Obviously, I don’t know why. This might be how Wilkins chose to write it, or their own choice. Which one was it and why? I don’t think this is a question that needs to be asked and answered. But they are definitely not around when Raising Steam is…being made.

Wilkins again: “It was a tough job. In keeping with everything getting harder, the writing again got harder. Individual sentences were still gleaming, there were flourishes and whole scenes that sang, the carpet squares were still appearing. But where was it all heading? As never before, I found myself worrying about that as we were going along. The scenes accumulated and accumulated, the word-count rose and rose in the bottom corner of my screen, and yet the unifying, crystallizing vision that would have turned these scenes into a novel wasn’t emerging. […] I was letting him run because what else was I to do? Terry lived to write, so every day that Terry wrote he stayed alive. […] Over that weekend I [Wilkins – BL] went back over the text, stripped out the scenes that were repeats of each other and the scenes that set off down dead ends, and realized, with a sinking heart, that there was no narrative direction whatsoever.” This would be followed by Wilkins and Pratchett’s editor Philippa Dickinson – whose input until then mostly consisted of being told off over the phone. Now her role was… I don’t have a word, let’s settle for ‘expanded’. “Every morning, having reviewed the previous day’s progress, Philippa would call me to say where she thought we should try and go that day. And every evening I would call her and report on where, with my coaxing, Terry had gone.”

Every day that Terry wrote he stayed lucrative. I am not suggesting that this is what and why happened. It’s just a fact of life. Wilkins and Dickinson have shown incredible modesty by not crediting themselves as co-authors on the cover. More facts of life follow in the book. Or don’t.

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When Pratchett was originally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he spent a year being filmed for the documentary Terry Pratchett: Living With Alzheimer’s. This was comfortable to exactly nobody involved. But he wanted to be open about the embuggerance, learn what it was doing, show it to people. Sir Terry was not known for keeping his opinions to himself ever since he started writing letters to the local paper.

Watching the documentary was…unbelievable. It opens with Pratchett trying, and failing, to put on a tie. (He has never really worn ties.) Doing vocabulary tests and, I mean, this is Pratchett, not just succeeding, but suggesting that it’s the tests that have Alzheimer’s. Then trying to copy a drawing. Failing at doing a reading onstage, blaming ‘the shadow’, joking that the shadow was his own head. It wasn’t. Re-enacting his search for the letter ’S’ that he accused Wilkins of having removed from the keyboard. Even knowing the illness would kill him didn’t make me feel this documentary could have been real. I’m still in denial and intend to remain there. Unlike Sir Terry.

In the first documentary, he got a tour of a facility for people with advanced forms of dementia, and seemed to quite like it. A few years later, he decided he was not interested. Just the title of the second documentary, Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die left little doubt as to what it was going to be about. (Let’s say this is not a hilarious watch.) The thing about Alzheimer’s, though, and I wish I had no idea what I am talking about, is that the decline is gradual. Choosing to Die came out in 2011, four years after the diagnosis, Gods-know-how-many years after the bogle first appeared in Pratchett’s head, ready to start eating his memories. How many memories were left in 2011? 2012, 2013, 2014?

Am I at 82% mark of this review? I just decided I am.

This part of the biography is a very difficult read. Not just because Wilkins (and, in all fairness, Pratchett himself, in the documentaries) doesn’t shy away from moments, hours, days that can only be described as humiliating. Or because many years earlier, an advance for a new Terry Pratchett novel was a million dollars, and by the time Raising Steam was being…made – well, the biography doesn’t say.

In 2011, when Pratchett witnesses a man die in Swiss Dignitas clinic and declares him ‘the bravest man I have ever met’ Wilkins disagrees. “Terry’s mounting belief in the justice of the cause meets my increasing unease about what we’re witnessing. What about the family and friends left behind? They were the ones I kept thinking about. […] I told him, ‘I’ll do anything for you, but, if that moment ever comes, I’m not organizing for you to come to Switzerland to die.’ We argued about it, including, probably most strongly, at the airport in Zurich on the way home after witnessing Peter Smedley’s passing. I told Terry he lacked empathy for those who were left. He told me I couldn’t possibly understand where he was coming from.” Does Pratchett ever make the decision? Choose the moment? Does he remember he can and how hard he fought for the cause? As I said, Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease. And Wilkins – who is the person Pratchett has to rely on almost everything, by then – doesn’t particularly care what Sir Terry thinks or wants.

“And then it was 2014, and we started losing him at 100mph. […] Friday, 5 December 2014: that was his final day in the office. The Shepherd’s Crown was finished. […] What he [yes, ‘he’ – BL] hadn’t managed to incorporate was one final twist that he had conceived during the book’s writing. Terry had a notion that it might emerge that the deceased Granny Weatherwax had, in fact, temporarily placed her consciousness in You the cat […] Death would then only collect her in the Epilogue, with Granny declaring, ‘I am leaving on my own terms now.’ But there wasn’t time,” Wilkins sighs. “You had to stop somewhere: that was just a fact of life.”

Once the dead Pratchett is no longer a writing Pratchett, Lyn and Rhianna find their way into the book. So does this part: “[A BBC journalist] offered his condolences and asked carefully, ‘Was Terry assisted?’ […] I was able to tell him that, no: this fervent proponent of the right to die with dignity at the time of your choosing [emphasis mine – BL] had himself died quietly and naturally at home with his family around him and his cat curled up at the foot of his bed.” That, too, was just a fact of life – Wilkins’s, as he is the one that picks up the phone and talks with the journalists. 

But there is that letter, written five months earlier, in which Sir Terry bluntly says ‘Terry Pratchett is dead.’ And while Lyn and Rhianna Pratchett are mostly missing from the book, the obituary penned by Rhianna states: “[H]is passionate advocacy for assisted dying was vitally important in raising awareness of the fact that a good death should be as important as a good life. He would have been horrified that our politicians have failed to see that.”

As a co-manager of the author’s literary estate, Rob Wilkins continues to profit from Pratchett’s body of work. I allege nothing. It’s a fact of life. And I did cry my eyes out in gratitude when the last book, The Shepherd’s Crown, turned out to be Tiffany Aching’s. I have no idea what the relationship between Pratchett’s family and Rob Wilkins was or is. I only think a lot about Wilkins actually writing “this fervent proponent of the right to die with dignity at the time of your choosing had himself died quietly and naturally at home” and being proud of that.

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I recommend this book to all Terry Pratchett fans.

Assisted death in the UK remains a topic so current The Guardian has devoted an entire series of articles to it. Let’s imagine the government came up with a proposal and put it to a referendum. If you’d vote ‘nay’, you will love the last chapters. ‘Aye’? I suggest you stop reading at the first mention of Raising Steam. Or a bit earlier than that. How large a bit? You’re the one to decide when your discomfort overwhelms the pleasure of reading. For me, that was 82%. I don’t get to leave ratings for separate sections, so my final rating reflects my feelings after reading the book twice, and on re-read being much slower, because I dreaded the final part so much. A bit like the final season of Game of Thrones, I suppose. I know there will never be an actual, objective biography – it’s Wilkins who recorded Pratchett’s memories, guided him, and does ‘objective’ even exist? I just wouldn’t mind a different ending, both for The Shepherd’s Crown and Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes.