Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes: The Official Biography

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It was touching to read of Terry’s friendships, and how he was affected by the death of Douglas Adams, whose books were important to him. “In 1983, when a reviewer in Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine declared The Colour of Magic the funniest thing he had ever read, Terry’s response was, ‘He couldn’t have read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, then.’” Flabbergastingly, there were also quite some history lessons in this book. I, for example, had not known there was a nuclear incident scaled 5-out-of-7 in Pennsylvania in the 70s (as a European, I mostly heard about Chernobyl and the much later incident at Fukushima but not much else). It’s this kind of added value that make this shine even brighter. A truly wonderful and heartbreaking tale, filled with memories typed by Pratchett himself and lovingly woven with those of writer and ‘best PA in the world’ (read the book), Rob Wilkins. The unique humour and storytelling that carries you along in all of the adventure’s in Prattchett’s fiction is present throughout this biography which is filled with characters and situations as colourful and as rich as those from his books, making this a really enjoyable read. Lively and affectionate, this is not a critical biography, but nor is it sycophantic. It shows Pratchett as brilliant and generous, but also cantakerous, with a ruthless sense of the ridiculous. i News

I got the audio version of the book partly because I knew I'd never be able to get through it without crying (and it's hard to read with tears all over your tablet) but also because it was read (very beautifully) by the author, Rob Wilkins (Terry's personal assistant). This biography was written by someone who knew him personally, and I must say it was by far the best biography I've ever read. 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. Drawing on his own extensive memories, as well as those of Terry’s family, close friends, fans and the colleagues who worked with him over the years, Rob recounts Terry’s story – from his early childhood to the literary phenomenon that his Discworld series became. It also chronicles Terry’s later years, his championing of environmental and humanitarian causes, and how he met and coped with the challenges that ‘The Embuggerance’ of Alzheimer’s brought with it. Before his death, Terry was working on an autobiography, which was never completed—but contrary to the hard-drive containing all of his unpublished fiction, which, in accordance with his final wishes, was ritually destroyed by a steamroller, Rob took it upon himself to finish what Terry had started. He draws largely from Terry’s unfinished manuscript, but also from the stories of friends, family, and former colleagues… and if you thought that it wouldn’t be all that interesting until Terry becomes the beloved, bestselling author we all think of him as, then you would be very wrong. He lived a life filled with astonishing achievements in a variety of jobs, and had some peculiar hobbies and interests, ranging from electrical engineering, to beekeeping, gaming, rescuing tortoises, gardening, and casting insects in gold and silver. Always one with an inquisitive mind and easily kindled curiosity, Terry insisted on forging his own sword after being knighted for services to literature. It’s all illuminating, and I appreciated that Rob didn’t try to sugarcoat or hide Terry’s more disagreeable personality traits, such as his irascibility and ingratitude, but there were also many sweet, and even more funny passages. The book turns truly exceptional in the solemn final third though—right around when Terry starts exhibiting some worrying symptoms, which culminated in an earth-shattering diagnosis of Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare, visual variant of Alzheimer’s disease.The biography will be published in September. Publisher Transworld said it would move from Pratchett being told at the age of six by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything, through the writing of the bestselling Discworld series, his winning the Carnegie medal and his knighthood for services to literature. Wilkins will also cover how Pratchett coped with the challenges of Alzheimer’s. Two years after bestselling and beloved British author Terry Pratchett died, the hard drive was taken out of his computer and run over by a steamroller – as per his instructions. No drafts, no half-finished stories, no lost scenes from his novels were ever going to see the light of day. In life, Pratchett guarded his work and his legacy very closely. It makes sense that this attitude would continue even beyond the span of his life. However, there would be days, when the mood was right, when Terry would tell me to open the memoir file, and he would do an afternoon on the autobiography, him dictating, me typing. At the point at which we ran out of time, the file had grown to just over 24,000 words, rough-hewn, disjointed, awaiting the essential polish that Terry would never be in a position to give them. He was intending to call the book A Life With Footnotes.

It will include “fragments” from the memoir Pratchett was working on before he died, the publisher added.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. 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. Wilkins lays out stories where Pratchett, having found success in his writing, negotiates high-figure advances down out of concern that a particular book might not earn it out fast enough. Pratchett tries to have his books pulled from contention from awards because he hated being shortlisted if he wasn’t going to win. Wilkins is a faithful and comprehensive documenter of Pratchett's life . . . moving and sensitive. Canberra Times