Self and Fiction in Walking to Hollywood

Abstract

Walking to Hollywood (2010) presents a triptych of tales all experienced and recounted by someone named ‘Will Self’. At its centre is an inventive and absurdist picaresque, based on Self’s own walk to Hollywood from an LA airport, as he quests to discover who has murdered modern cinema. Ostensibly a postmodern novel in the tradition of Pynchon and DeLillo, the book in fact describes itself as ‘three memoirs’. This chapter reads Walking to Hollywood as life writing and specifically autofiction, analysing its experiments in fictionalizing details from, and reflections upon, its author’s life. Self directs the reader to his playful employment of displacement, distortion and role-playing and the chapter argues that such strategies develop an argument on the relationship between identity and the ubiquity of fiction-making.