AA Gill was once a raging drunk. Now he’s an enragingly brilliant critic, writes Michele Magwood for the Sunday Times
Pour Me: A Life
AA Gill (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
*****
When AA Gill woke up one morning, or surfaced – alcoholics don’t simply wake up, he says – there were spiders hanging onto the ceiling. “They were huge, the size of soup plates, heavy as guilt. They scuttled. No, spiders don’t scuttle, they move with a horrible purpose. Spiders octorate.”
The spiders didn’t exist, of course. They were an hallucination, a textbook case of the DTs, and the only way to make them go away was to get drunk again as quickly as possible. “I sucked a whisky bottle in the corner, not daring to look up.”
One expects this book to be a traditional, albeit brilliantly told, recovery memoir, the usual recipe of from rock-bottom to rehab to laundered, fulgent redemption. Redemptive it is – he is now one of the most powerful and highest-paid columnists in the UK, after all – but it’s a sardonic, somewhat anxious, recollection of wrecked love, failed hopes and disability, of a rackety childhood – “My parents’ marriage wasn’t so much open as draughty” – a brother who vanished and has never returned, and wincing details of the physical toll of alcohol abuse.
Each morning he would vomit so much he burst the blood vessels in his forehead and eyes. He tempers it, though, with exquisite passages about art, fatherhood and food. When he got sober, food, and the preparation of it, became his comfort, or rather his compass. “From salt and vinegar crisps to the body and blood of Christ, from mother’s milk to your final sip of poppied morphine, food is the metaphor and the simile and the parable of every important moment in our lives.”
Gill is best known as a food critic and his phosphorescent reviews can close restaurants. Here’s one example: “A button that called a waiter would have been useful; a button that called the waiter a twat would have been better; a button that severely electrocuted the chef would have been amusing.” In another, he describes the waiters in a Paris restaurant: “Paunchy, combative, surly men, bulging out of their white jackets with the meaty malevolence of gouty buffalo.”
His other writing is equally trenchant, whether he is eviscerating a TV programme, describing a Dubai building as “a monument to small-nation penis envy” or taking apart singer Morrissey’s bloated autobiography. “Morrissey is plainly the most ornery, cantankerous, entitled, whingeing, self-martyred human being who ever drew breath. And those are just his good qualities.”
It’s surprising, then, to learn that Gill is profoundly dyslexic. He was “dim” at school, tongue-tied with a stammer, and barely able to write. To this day he dictates his pitch-perfect copy down the phone to a scribe. He was visually brilliant, though, and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, but didn’t have it in him to be a painter of any real worth. “It was like being good at scales but not being a great pianist.” When he fell into journalism he felt he had come home, had found the thing “I was meant to do. Meant to be.”
He has his detractors. You cannot slash and burn without some push-back. He is routinely accused of being arrogant and spiteful. He couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss. “When people fatuously ask why I don’t write constructive criticism, I tell them there is no such thing. Critics do deconstructive criticism. If you want compliments, phone your mother.” In a world of creeping political correctness and PR-generated bilge, AA Gill is a fabulous blow torch.
Follow Michele Magwood on Twitter @michelemagwood
Book details
- Pour Me: A Life by AA Gill
EAN: 9780297609704
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