Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

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This book is a loving treatment of an author that gave so many fantastic books, the Discworld series and many others. Wilkins draws from Pratchett’s incomplete autobiographical notes, Wilkins’ own experiences with Pratchett’s over more than a decade, and interviews with Pratchett’s family, closest friends, and colleagues. He tells a wonderful and inspirational story, even once Death starts lingering around the Chapel. Writers and readers alike will be enchanted and inspired by Pratchett’s life.

Why is he so underestimated? The world he created was brilliantly absurd – elephants all the way down – and strangely convincing. I remember arriving by car in Palermo, in Sicily, one day and one of my children saying “we’re on holiday in Ankh-Morpork”. Unlike any other fantasy world, Discworld constantly responds to our own. You’ve only got to look at the titles of the books ( Reaper Man, The Fifth Elephant) – parodies of films. Discworld is the laboratory where Pratchett carried out thought experiments on everything from social class and transport policy to the nature of time and death. Discworld, like Middle-earth, is immersive in a way that tempts people to dress up, draw street maps, tabulate its rules and pretend they live there There was Terry Pratchett who had to be bribed by his mother to do some reading until one day he found a book that enthralled him enough to start reading everything — and eventually create stories that similarly enthralled millions of readers. There was Pratchett the journalist and the nuclear industry press man, the guy who loved tinkering with electronics (and who had 6 monitor screens because - of course - there just wasn’t room for 8) and building greenhouses and raising goats. The man who from the age of 20 was the most married man in the world. The Terry who forged his own sword after being knighted for his contribution to literature (in your face, literary snobs). The Pratchett who could write two books a year because he took his job seriously, and yet have every book be amazing enough as though he’d spent years polishing it. It paints the picture of a writer who loved what he did. Adored it, was bewildered by it sometimes, often doubted it and his own success, but never once took it for granted. A writer who worked incredibly hard and got his just desserts, until sadly his imagination was so diminished by a cruel disease that ultimately killed him.

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In terms of writing its really interesting seeing some of how Pratchett operated as an author and his progression through his early books to the Discworld. I would have loved even more insights - the most info is about some of the first few books as in a strange sense I think when Pratchett's career really took off there was little time for reflection, his writing schedule was ridiculous, publicity overwrought and in general there probably wasn't much space for note taking. At the age of six, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. Terry 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. Next, I learned that, “Terry used to describe himself as ‘horizontally wealthy,” meaning that money hadn’t changed the person that he was, he could just afford to buy more things. However, he made some interesting choices, “instead of a Delorean DMC-12, Terry bought a shepherd’s hut,” which is “where [he] had the idea for the character of Tiffany Aching.” Yet we had no clear idea how long we had. One year? Two years? We had more time than we knew, in fact; it would be seven years before Terry’s last day at work. Yet, when it came down to it, the priority was always the novels – first Nation, the book Terry was working on at the time of the diagnosis, and then Unseen Academicals, I Shall Wear Midnight, Snuff, Dodger, Raising Steam, The Shepherd’s Crown … All through this period he was chasing to get those stories down. My nits here are few. I wish there were more on Pratchett’s collaborations with Neil Gaiman and Stephen Baxter. I’m curious whence Pratchett’s autobiographical notes and soon-to-be published short story collection when his unpublished works were ceremoniously destroyed. And I missed any heroic flaws. Yes, he was a dogged perfectionist, but that’s an answer you give job interviewers when they ask what’s you weak point.

Fond, funny and conveys a pitch-perfect sense of how Pratchett managed to take the elements of his 1950s working-class childhood . . . and turn it into a universe of limitless richness and invention. Mail on Sunday Aged nine or 10, his daughter Rhianna drew a picture of a hat and wrote underneath it: “I love my father but he is very busy.” 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”. It took me a few months before I actually read this biography of Terry, written by his long-time personal assistant Rob Wilkins, even though I bought it the day it came out. Honestly, I was just not ready to read about Terry succumbing to early onset Alzheimer’s, the “embuggerance” that creeped up robbing him of what made him Terry Pratchett, the writer and the person, until it prematurely robbed him of his life.Writen by his assistant and friend, Rob Wilkins, we are taken on an inspiring, hilarious and emotional journey throughout Terry's entire life. i'm hoping i'll be able to persuade my sister (who's never touched a discworld book in her life) to read this, and not even because i want her to somehow magically understand what pratchett's writing means to me - even if i did, that's arguably not within this book's scope - but because i think it is, for want of a better word, a story well told. 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.