In 1988, during the final days of their mother’s life, Will Self and his half brother were at her apartment in North London when they discovered a trove of boxes under her bed. Inside were diaries — around 50, spiral bound and hardcover, dating back five decades to their mother’s first marriage in Ithaca, N.Y.
Suddenly, the brothers were face to face with their mother’s unfiltered musings on marriage, sex — extramarital and otherwise — and their own personalities. The view was not always complimentary.
“There was the shock of their existence,” Self said. “Then there was the shock of the content. And then there was the fact that we were reading them while the woman who had written them was dying.”
Elaine Rosenbloom was 65 years old, an Ohio native who married two different academic, writerly types and had three sons, two of whom are writers. Even 30 years ago, Self said, he knew it was only a matter of time until someone in the family “cannibalized” the diaries for an article or a book.
Now, at 62, he’s done just that, with an honesty befitting a son who’s staring down his own mortality.
“She taught me to be the writer I am, and I’m a good one,” he said. “I was difficult and violent and drug addicted by the time I was 15 and then I gave her merry hell almost till she died. So I have a lot to feel bad about. This is my payback.”
Self’s 13th novel, “Elaine,” tells the story of a housewife enduring an unhappy marriage to a Cornell professor while navigating Ithaca’s academic elite in the 1950s. The book, which comes out on Sept. 17, hews closely to this period of Self’s mother’s life, but for the most part, Self stopped short of borrowing her words.
Instead, he read around 500 pages of his mother’s writings, practiced her neat cursive as a way of burrowing inside her head and, in 2022, traveled from London to upstate New York to conduct his own research. Self grew up in England but spent time in Ithaca as a child when, he explained, “like a dog returning to her vomit,” his mother returned to Cornell with his father, her second husband, whom she’d met while he was on sabbatical.
Self has been a mainstay — and occasional rabble rouser — on the British literary scene since the early ’90s. In addition to his satirical, freewheeling novels, he’s written six story collections and nine works of nonfiction, including “Will,” a third-person memoir of addiction.
“What he’s accomplished is going to endure,” Morgan Entrekin, Self’s longtime friend and publisher, said of his body of work. “If you want to know what was going on in these decades, Will Self will be a window into it.”
Self is also a journalist and the occasional subject of gossip columns, some of it unflattering. A 1997 Publishers Weekly profile described him as an “enfant terrible.” If Bret Easton Ellis, Augusten Burroughs and Don DeLillo were to meet up for dinner, Self would be a logical fourth.
“Elaine” is an unvarnished, irreverent, logical extension of Self’s oeuvre. He neither romanticizes his protagonist nor lionizes his mother. Both appear, on the page and in conversation, as flawed, fallible human beings, shackled by their own intelligence inside the women’s prison of their generation.
In the book, Elaine pops Miltown (a predecessor of Valium) while her husband pontificates about John Milton. When she types his manuscripts, she “picks up her own pen and traces the outlines of his words.”
In real life, Elaine Rosenbloom “had quite severe mental health problems,” Self said. “You never knew what was going to happen. She could flip. You had to read her mood.”
She also swore, raged and obsessed about her weight, jotting the number on her bedroom wall — “a record of her imprisonment,” according to Self. In diaries from her 30s, he said, “she was “already bemoaning the loss of her looks. You would think an intelligent woman, even then, would be able to avoid the most crass level of low self-worth around not being a willowy shiksa blond.”
During a wide-ranging semi-monologue that included dozens of literary allusions and snippets of French and German, and later continued by email, Self pointed out that the era he wrote about in “Elaine” predated Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and “the problem with no name” by a decade. This might explain the undoing of both Elaines: They were women of words, minus the language of liberation.
But, Self said, “This is not some attempt by a valetudinarian male novelist to make Mother out as some crusading feminist. This is a woman, though, and she deserves to be felt and heard.”
Rosenbloom was known to flout the conventions of her “tame, privet-lined suburb.” When Self was 7, he complained about having to line up and shake hands with his teachers on the last day of school. “My mother said, ‘Fine. I’ll have the car waiting with the door open and my foot on the accelerator. When it gets to your turn, come down the stairs and leap in the car and we’ll drive away.’”
She also advised telling the teachers, in unprintable terms, what to do with themselves. “That was my mother,” Self said.
He had no trouble channeling her frustrations or slipping into a simulacrum of her body — and he doesn’t shy away from particulars like masturbation, “bloodstained Kotex” and “sad, slack breasts.”
Self said, “It’s surely one of the great delights of being a novelist, to personate the other. If you don’t get a kick out of that, you’re in the wrong game.”
Of course, the diaries helped.
Rosenbloom “always had a notebook,” Self said, but “I had no idea what she did in it.” He wasn’t especially curious. He never prowled his mother’s desk, searching for information about her interior life.
“I’m a son,” he said, allowing that a daughter might have taken a different approach. Plus, he added, “She. Was. Terrifying.”
Still, Self was aware of his mother’s artistic frustrations. “Elaine’s sense of having missed out, in terms of a creative and intellectual life, animated my childhood,” Self said.
But Rosenbloom talked about trying to write in a “dilettantish” way that Self didn’t take seriously: “I knew she wasn’t any good. She knew I knew.”
Self continued, “What’s required, assuming you’ve got the talent, is quite hard. It’s not just practical, it’s psychological. It’s a vocation. And she just didn’t have that calling strongly enough, to make the sacrifices.”
For Self, who has four children and is married to Nelly Kaprielian-Self, a fellow novelist, the research trip to Cornell was difficult. He was alone. He had fallen out with his brother. Other than a visit with his publisher, Entrekin, he wasn’t in the mood to socialize.
“I was miserable,” Self said.
A few months later, he was diagnosed with cancer. He recently completed a yearlong training regimen to prepare for a stem cell transplant, scheduled to take place two weeks after his book comes out. (“I’m fit now, like a boxer,” he said. “I get people to feel my buttocks.”)
Peter Blackstone, Self’s editor at Grove, pointed out that, for some writers, parents’ diaries would be “the last thing you would want to read or delve into.” But for Self, whose books are “so interior and focused on a singular psychology, so within the head of a person,” the diaries became a “treasure trove.”
Copies of his mother’s diaries are now part of Self’s literary estate, housed at the British Library. His half brother donated the originals to Cornell University, where Rosenbloom’s first husband taught.
In “Elaine,” the titular character burns her old notebooks.
She is, Self writes in the book, “indisputably a writer, since she diarizes compulsively — and even that terrible purge had failed to cure her of the habit: Within days, she’d begun again, summoning more selves into existence by setting down the truth about her tumultuous feelings pell-mell, without trouble to dress them up in rhyme, or teach them a rhythm.”
The real Elaine never burned a diary, to the best of Self’s knowledge. He said, laughing, “The idea that there are more is terrifying.”
The prospect of his children spelunking in his papers doesn’t seem to faze Self (“It’s a tough life, the writer’s family, isn’t it?”), nor does the subject of death.
“I’ve had a lot of death in my life,” he said. “My first novel was called ‘How the Dead Live.’ My first story is ‘The North London Book of the Dead,’ and it’s about meeting my dead mother. She’s been my inspiration, my muse, my subject matter.”
With “Elaine,” a bit of Self’s mother lives on. The book’s epigraph comes from one of her diary entries, dated February 1956: “A woman who cannot, or will not, accept the conditions of her servitude naturally and gracefully, deserves what has happened to me.”
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