William Burroughs died in 1997, after a lifetime of notoriety. The granddaddy of the Beats, druggy, dangerous and bleak, author of 13 controversial, shocking novels.
In his final years, he was writing only in his journals. The last nine months of his dairies are in this book, and they form a complex, rarely seen, personal portrait of Burroughs at the end of his life, coming to terms with aging and death. Although well into his eighties, the man we see is nevertheless the same old Burroughs, still riling against the Establishment, still contemptuous of the state of the human race, still shocking, bleak and funny.
The diaries are full of anecdotes and memories, entries on the joys of housekeeping, dealing with doctors, shooting a video with U2, musings on his beloved cats, drug-taking and government cover-ups. These journals contains some of the most brutally personal prose Burroughs has ever written. The deaths of his friends, Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, provide a window onto the preparations he was making for his own death - a quest for absolution marked by a profound sense of guilt and loss.
