Some years ago, a young scribbler named William Leith began a column for the Independent on Sunday that divided opinion among readers and, indeed, other young scribblers like me. Instead of writing about the world outside, as columnists had previously felt obliged to, he wrote about himself and his collapsing life in simple, unadorned prose. I remember reading it every week to the sound of my own grinding teeth, partly because I couldn’t see the point of it, but mainly because at the time I was consumed by professional jealousy of any contemporary who was clearly doing better than I was. I completely missed the boldness, even fearlessness, in his writing. In an extrovert industry, where displays of excessive confidence are all but mandatory, here was a train-wreck of neurosis, self-doubt and self-destruction — almost like a younger Jeffrey Bernard, with a full set of limbs, but writing as a form of therapy, in a desperate and almost certainly doomed attempt to make sense of it all. As it turned out, Leith’s column was hugely influential. Now, every newspaper is full of woe-is-me losers chugging on about their dreary lives, while out there the world burns, almost completely unreported. But Leith did it first and I now realise, being older and having seen off the professional jealousy problem, that he did it best. Nowadays he’s doing it in book form, to my mind better than ever.
Bits of Me are Falling Apart follows The Hungry Years, a hilariously grim confessional about Leith’s obsessive consumption of food, drink, drugs and anything else he could lay his hands on. By the time that book came out, he seemed to have found some stability: a good relationship, a new-born son, sobriety and public acclaim. Three years later, the wheels have fallen off again. We begin the book with Leith sleeping on a mattress on the floor of his office, the relationship having collapsed, his self-esteem at a new low, his fear of illness and death dominating his few remaining coherent thoughts. There comes a time in everyone’s life when it dawns on you that you have used up too many opportunities without anything much to show for them; and that you may not have very many opportunities left. It’s called middle age. As writers, of course, we can be ‘promising’ for longer than normal mortals — so many of us have only hit our stride in our fifties and sixties, or even older. But as supposedly functional and responsible human beings, we can’t still be ‘promising’ at 47. We can, however, be washed up, and that’s how William Leith feels.
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