"When I started writing the biography I thought it would be something like 'He got up. He had some breakfast. Yes, he wrote. He ate some dinner and wrote some more. He played some video games. And he went to bed'". This is what Rob Wilkins, personal assistant to the writer Terry Pratchett (1948-2015), thought would be to write his biography, but luckily for readers, it has ended up being something else entirely.
The book is Terry Pratchett. A life with footnotes (Mai Més, in Catalan and Spanish, and which has just received the prestigious prize for the best non-fiction book of the British Science Fiction Association), and brings us closer to the life of creator of the Discmón, 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, was fabulous, but I didn't know how this would translate to the reader", he explains 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 outbreak of JK Rowling, more than 100 million copies of his more than sixty books, and allows “ look behind the curtain to see how it happened". Is there a secret? "To do it as well as he does you need two things: first, to be Terry Pratchett, and then to find the time to concentrate on writing at the expense of anything else." And indeed, the book shows a writer concerned almost only with writing.
However, he also answers the why of writing when he remembers his time at school, where the teachers predicted that he would never do anything good in life. According to his assistant, now also executor, "the fuel that fueled the engine that drove Discmón was anger, Terry was resentful of those teachers for belittling him. He looked at the books in Beaconsfield Public Library and thought 'if they can do it, so can I', and I think it takes a special kind of person to do that. I don't go into the Sistine Chapel, look at the ceiling and think that I can do that too; I know I can't".
It is a book rich in anecdotes and, as the title indicates, profuse in footnotes. Between one thing and the other, we get the whole portrait of a man with his many jokes and with great respect for readers, for whom he could spend hours and hours signing books.
Despite the attempts to make audiovisual adaptations, not many have been made, and the most successful ones are that of Bons averanys – a half-written novel with Neil Gaiman – and most recently the animated film The prodigious Maurice.
The most painful part of writing, Wilkins says, were the last ten years, since he was diagnosed with a variety of Alzheimer's that gradually disabled him physically, but which allowed him to write until a few months before he died. Of course, after a certain moment, he began to dictate: "He said that at the end of the day we are chatty monkeys who tell each other stories. And he was right, but when he dictated he had everything in his head, he could retain a hundred thousand words and refer to any part at any time, word for word. In a way it was like I had the story written in my head and he was just reading it to me. He never hesitated, he never stopped." “While I was still writing, I was still Terry Pratchett. It was very important for him to continue being a writer until the end of his life", remembers Wilkins.
An ending that, in addition to writing, he dedicated to various causes and that led him to share his day-to-day life, which until then he had kept strictly private, with the world in two impactful documentaries: one about the his life with the disease, and the other about the right to die with dignity.
It was the disease that took Sir Terence David John Pratchett at the age of 66, in an end that his daughter Rihanna and Wilkins made public with a scene that could have been in a book:
"-FINALLY, SIR TERRY, WE HAVE TO GO FOLD.
Terry clung to Death's arm and followed him through the gates into the black desert beneath the endless night.
Be".
