You Cannot Live As I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This
The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson
Though born into privilege and inheriting a fortune, Willie Donaldson ended up dying alone in a seedy rented flat, his computer still logged on to a lesbian porn site.
To some, he had been one of the great, underrated comic writers of our time, and to others, a dangerous force of corruption and decadence.
His achievements were significant - he published Sylvia Plath while still at Cambridge University, as a producer in the Sixties he staged Beyond the Fringe, and he was later to write the celebrated Henry Root Letters - but were not as impressive as his reckless talent for self-destruction.
The impresario became a serial bankrupt. The man about town, who had lived with Sarah Miles and been engaged to Carly Simon, ended up as a ponce in a Chelsea brothel. Success as a writer quickly led him into a dark underworld of crack addiction, fraud and sexual obsession.
Friend and collaborator Terence Blacker unravels the intimate truth of Willie Donaldson's strange story in all its glamour, hilarity and pain.
| A Radio 4 Book of the Week: |
“Utterly gripping.hilarious, heartbreaking”
- Sunday Times
“A startling and brilliant biography which reads like a Rake's Progress for the 21st century”
- Daily Mail
“Superb and sensational"”
- Daily Express
“Terrific . I don't suppose I'll read a more interesting biography for a while”
- Evening Standard
“Once in a blue moon comes a biography that has the texture of life-as-it-is-lived, the usual province of fiction . With stealth and sympathy, the biographer has followed his subject's footsteps into all sorts of strange by-ways, most of them frightening or humiliating or forlorn”
- Craig Brown, Daily Telegraph
“Excellent”
- Literary Review
“Sympathetic and extremely enjoyable”
- Daily Telegraph
