He's self hating and self obsessed

Reading Jonathan Self's memoir of his family life, I was provoked by nearly every line to ask from where a piece of published writing derives its justification. I have read some bad books, but few that have troubled me so with the question of their legitimacy, and in the end I was driven to marvel at the frequency with which publishers appear able to locate the line between what can be published and what should not. That line is always hardest to find when it travels through issues of celebrity, as it does in the case of Self Abuse. Jonathan's claim to fame, as it were, is that he is Will Self's brother: the title invokes that claim, but this crumb of interest could sustain only the most craven devotee of Will Self's work through the 250-odd pages that follow. In fact, its victimised overtones suggest - rightly - that even the devotee will get little change out of this volume. Will's presence is certainly discernible here, but he has left his mark in the manner of a muddy boot on a doormat. This is the doormat's story.

"I attribute my increasing self-awareness to analysis," writes Self in his final pages. "Without therapy, I doubt I would have been able to instigate change in my life." This gratitude has its opposite in blame. The greater part of Self's therapeutic process appears to have involved, conventionally enough, the shedding of any responsibility for the mess he has made of his life. This book is not only a testament to that process but a part of it. It is both confessional and tirade, a sorry litany of self-loathing and loathing of others, of self-pity and pitilessness. Jealousy of his younger brother seems not just to have marked Jonathan Self's life but to have spawned the conception of himself as his brother's negative: his ignominy is the dark twin of his brother's fame, his bitter writing the antithesis of the novelist's creativity. As it progresses, Self Abuse comes to seem more and more the product not of Self's anger but of his inverted vanity.

Those years of therapy have loosened Self's tongue on a number of subjects, upon which fans of self-exposure will no doubt be delighted to hear him expand: drug addiction, eating disorders, violence both taken and dished out, self-mutilation, bullying, sexual abuse and marital breakdown. They may applaud his free expression of hatred for his parents, his schoolmates, his teachers and his two ex-wives, his facility for naming and shaming, the invincible quality of his self-pity. Others might find the ring of truth slightly harder to hear, which brings us back to the question of legitimacy: it requires some skill to transform personal grievances into the stuff of universal truth and interest. Jonathan Self does not possess this skill, not even by fraternal association. Indeed, once again he possesses its opposite, the ability to rob his own pronouncements of authenticity. He is afflicted by bathos, and by an imaginative dysfunction that is by turns morbid, boastful, masochistic and self-canonising, so that inadvertently one is drawn into that very relationship with the author - abuse - of which he complains.

Self cheerfully assures us that his violence towards his own children hasn't affected them. He has sought their forgiveness, and sensibly they gave it to him; they dwell peaceably, for now, within the sphere of his self-absorption, for he clearly remains a troubled and angry man with little facility for acceptance or understanding. His definition of "self-awareness" is too rudimentary to resolve this dreadful tale. It is awareness of Self, and not much else.