“When I started writing the biography I thought it would be something like ‘he got up. She had a little breakfast. Yes, she wrote her. She ate a little and wrote some more. He played some video games. And she went to bed.'” That's what Rob Wilkins, personal assistant to writer Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), thought it would be to write the biography, but luckily for readers, it has gone much further.
The book is Terry Pratchett. A life with footnotes (Mai Més, in Spanish and Catalan, and which has just received the prestigious award for best non-fiction book from the British Science Fiction Association), and brings us closer to the life of the creator of Discworld, a flat literary universe that rests on four elephants that are on a turtle that navigates the universe, made up of 41 novels for all audiences with high doses of fantasy and humor, but that also portray the problems of our environment.
"Being by his side while these books were being created, because the written word is the most exciting thing for me, it was fabulous, but I didn't know how that would translate to the reader," he explained to La Vanguardia by phone. And contrary to what Wilkins initially thought, the book explains the intense life of the British writer who sold the most books before the emergence of JK Rowling, more than 100 million copies of his more than sixty books, and allows "to look behind the scenes." curtain to see how it happened.” Is there a secret? "To do as well as he does you need two things: first, being Terry Pratchett, and then finding the time to focus on writing at the expense of everything else." And indeed, the book shows a writer concerned almost only with writing.
Now, he also responds to the reason for writing when he remembers his time at school, where the teachers predicted that he would not do anything good in life. According to his assistant, now also executor, “the fuel that fed the engine that Discworld drove was anger, Terry resented those teachers for having belittled him. He looked at the books in the Beaconsfield Public Library and thought 'if they can do it, so can I', and I think that takes a special kind of person. I don't go into the Sistine Chapel, I look at the ceiling and think that I can do it too; I know I can't."
It is a book rich in anecdotes and, as the title indicates, profuse in footnotes, and the whole offers the portrait of a man with his many hobbies and great respect for readers, for whom he could spend hours and hours signing books .
Despite attempts to make audiovisual adaptations, not many have been made, and the most successful are Good Omens –a novel half-written with Neil Gaiman– and the recent animated film The Amazing Mauritius.
The most painful part of writing, Wilkins says, was the final ten years, after he was diagnosed with a form of Alzheimer's that left him physically disabled but allowed him to write only a few months before he died. Of course, from a certain moment, he began to dictate: “He said that after all we are talkative monkeys who explain stories to each other. And he was right, but when he dictated he had everything in his head, he could retain a hundred thousand words and refer to anything at any time, word for word. Somehow it was as if he had the story written in his head and he was just reading it to me. He never doubted, he never stopped ”. “While he was still writing, he was still Terry Pratchett. It was very important to him to remain a writer until the end of his life, ”recalls Wilkins.
A finale that, in addition to writing, he dedicated to various causes and which led him to share his day-to-day life, which until then he had kept strictly private, with the world in two impact documentaries: one about his life with the disease, and the another on the right to die with dignity.
It was illness that took Sir Terence David John Pratchett at age 66, in an ending that his daughter Rihanna and Wilkins made public with a scene that could have been in a book:
“–Finally, Sir Terry, we must go together.
Terry clung to Death's arm and followed him through the gates into the black desert under endless night.
END".
Catalan version, here
