AA Gill's sober truths: the critic on his lost years, his missing brother and why he's a fan of Jeremy Corbyn

He is the critic whose barbed comments can close restaurants, but a memoir of His alcoholism highlights AA Gill’s vulnerability. Hermione Eyre talks to him
Hermione Eyre3 December 2015

Never meet your heroes: the heart-throbs are always cripplingly insecure; the pop stars can’t sing; and the fearless, merciless critics who fire off twice-weekly columns of barbed, brilliantly aimed missiles turn out to be kindly, needy and earnest. ‘I can’t bear cynicism; I hate irony,’ says AA Gill, palpating his custom-made worry beads.

‘I’m terribly prone to anxiety,’ he says, over lunch at Selfridges. ‘I get very depressed and I get very anxious and my anxiety is almost always about my children. Where are they? Are they OK?’ Throughout our interview he watches my face, reading my reactions. ‘Addicts and alcoholics, we tend to be a lot more observant of people. There is a lot about being an addict that makes you very duplicitous. I can tell very quickly when people are lying.’ Charm is a big part of who he is and he sees it as allied to his dyslexia — or dyslectia, as he pronounces it. ‘Dyslectics learn charm at school. You need it to get by. My eight-year-old son Beetle is quite dyslectic and he has more charm than an entire finishing school…’

For all his vulnerability, Gill, 61, is a supremely powerful journalist. This is a restaurant critic who can close a food chain with a metaphor. His Sunday Times skirmishes include baboon-slaying and Mary Beard-baiting, but he insists he is not a contrarian, only honest. At the same time he bears powerful witness to famine and refugee crises. I have read him for years and I still find him electric, wonderfully unpredictable and trenchant. In person there are flashes of this. He enjoyably skewers nutritionists (‘a non-discipline’), people who carry bottles of water everywhere (‘mistaken’), nudge politics (‘printing pictures of dead babies on cigarette packets is absurd’), the evangelical Alpha course (‘censoriousness about sex I find deeply unpleasant’) and people who write comments underneath newspaper articles online (‘I look at them and think: “Why am I supposed to care what any of you think?” ’).

Pouring out his heart: AA Gill

But his tender, private side is uppermost today. He has just written a memoir, dictated from notes over the phone to a copytaker (his articles are filed in the same way). The book describes his lost year (‘or was it longer?’), his sense that he is ‘a Martian, an outsider, someone who hasn’t read the script’; his feeling, since childhood, of ‘cold, lonely sadness, mourning a loss that hadn’t happened yet’. The title is Pour Me: A Life. He wrote it to try to understand, ‘Why me? Why was I the alcoholic? Writing, for me, is the great organiser. It’s while writing that I think most deeply about things.’ This is on top of talking therapy and attending weekly NA and AA sessions. ‘I’ve been to meetings everywhere, all around the world. It’s awe-inspiring. A remarkable system. The A is for anonymous and to everyone there I’m just Adrian G.’

His father Michael produced Kenneth Clark’s TV series Civilisation; his mother Yvonne Gilan, now in her mid-eighties, was an actress who appeared in an episode of Fawlty Towers when Gill was a young teen. ‘When my mum was asked to do it, she showed me the script and I said, “This is terrible!” ’ He grimaces. ‘That was my first piece of criticism.’

His parents’ marriage, he writes, ‘wasn’t so much an open marriage as a draughty one’. Love and sadness pulse equally through the book. He writes movingly about how he failed to succeed as a professional artist — like Hitler. ‘You’re not the first to make that comparison,’ he rejoins. Gill is in a new mode in the book, pushing inwards rather than outwards. ‘It was horrible to write. Very emotional.’

His younger brother Nick, a Michelin-starred chef, went missing in 1998 after financial difficulties and a spell in jail. It is a huge, un-resolved blight. ‘Can I forget about him? No,’ says Gill. ‘It’s not a constant weeping thing, it’s a sadness. I feel sad for my mum, I feel sad that my dad died not knowing where his son is. I’m sad for Nick’s kids. And I’m sad for Nick.’ A 1979 painting by Gill of Nick turned up at auction at Christie’s last year. ‘I don’t know where it came from. I didn’t pursue it. If Nick wanted to get in touch with me, I’m not hard to find.’

Gill’s short-lived first marriage, to the writer Cressida Connolly, is summed up in his book through their shared objects: ‘orphaned china cups and potpourri and old, bald velvet...’ Tactful omissions and chivalrous synecdoches abound. He is still ‘very fond’ of Cressida, who approved the passages about their marriage before publication. She walked out on him during a dinner party; he can’t remember the details, only the stricken Stilton left behind.

At 30 he was told that his alcoholism was going to kill him. His symptoms included gastritis, pancreatitis, and scabs called guttate psoriasis: ‘Death signals from the blood in the bog, the pus in the sock, the tingling in the fingers.’ Delirium tremens meant he’d drink his first slug of alcohol in the morning using a towel as a pulley, so as not to break his teeth on the glass. On April Fool’s Day in 1984, he shared two bottles of vintage champagne with his father on the train to Clouds House rehab in Wiltshire, and hasn’t drunk since.

Except — and this isn’t in the book: ‘I’m a Protestant. When I first got sober I remember saying to the vicar, “I’m very concerned about taking Communion.” He said: “I don’t believe anything evil can happen to you at God’s altar rail.” I take Communion once or twice a year.’ His faith is personal, not preachy. ‘It’s entirely about making me a much better person than I would be without it.’ He says a prayer with his children every night, believing that being equipped with one good prayer is ‘like carrying a handkerchief’.

He has tough advice for how to stay sober at parties. ‘I drink water. I keep it concise. I’m not networking, I’m not on the pull, so there’s a sense of “Why should I be here?” After about 11.30pm it gets pretty tedious if you’re not drinking or taking coke.’ He doesn’t host parties either. ‘I don’t do dinner parties. I have people come to share the food I’ve cooked for the family.’ In his book he describes how he finds cooking soulful, therapeutic: ‘four and 20 black thoughts baked in a pie’.

Even when he was drinking, he wasn’t mad about parties. ‘I’ve always found big groups wearying. Alcoholics don’t tend to seek out masses of garrulous company. The worst night of my life, when I was drinking, was New Year’s Eve, when every f***ing amateur came out and wanted to drink cocktails. Also, everything cost twice as much.’

Does he miss drinking? ‘No. Oh, no. I was doing a restaurant review the other day and I ordered a large espresso, but instead of putting water into the espresso machine they put in vodka. I got such a shock. It was frightening.’ It doesn’t occur to me until later that this might be a restaurateur’s revenge. Gill doesn’t wish to reveal which restaurant it was — perhaps because he doesn’t want to get the staff responsible sacked. He has worked as a plongeur and a waiter in his time. ‘And a nanny and a decorator and in warehouses and on building sites... I’m very aware of how much people are paid and how their work feels. I mind very much that in most of the restaurants I go to the waiters could never afford thefood.’ He recently participated in the Evening Standard’s fair tipping campaign. ‘I didn’t earn the taxable minimum until I was nearly 40.’

Of Jeremy Corbyn, he says: ‘I’m quite a fan. There are a lot of things Corbyn believes that I believe. He’s a conviction politician, which makes the pragmatists look quite feeble, like a lot of paper men… You need both pragmatist politicians and conviction politicians in a country’s life, you don’t want all one or all the other, and we’ve had a long time of a lot of pragmatists.’ But would he vote for Corbyn? ‘I’ve always voted Labour, so we’ll see.’

His second marriage (from 1990 to 1995) was to Amber Rudd, elected Conservative MP for Hastings and Rye in 2010 and now Energy Secretary. Did he see her as a potential MP? ‘No,’ he smiles. ‘I’m very careful. I know that anything I say [in the book] about her and me, however benign, would be a hostage to fortune.’ Fracking is now in her hands. ‘Thankfully I don’t have an opinion about fracking. The truth is I adore Amber. We’re still close friends and she’s been the most amazing mother to our two children.’

Flora recently graduated from Oxford with a degree in theology and philosophy; Alasdair, two years younger, currently works in a bar. Gill’s youngest children, twins Isaac Mungo (Beetle) and Edith Lara, are with his partner of 20 years Nicola Formby, formerly a model, now a food consultant, and known to Gill’s restaurant review readers as ‘The Blonde’. When he went to register the twins’ birth in 2007 he sneaked in extra names Pyramus and Thisbe.

AA Gill meetings: the critic's memoir of his alcoholism highlights his vulnerability

His baroque sensibility is further evidenced by his papal intaglio ring, a semiprecious stone engraved with the image of an owl, a present from Nicola, which he is wearing on his little finger; his cufflinks are made out of iridescent beetles’ wings. He has grizzled salt and pepper hair, doggedly British teeth and a slightly fey voice. ‘I’m not cut out for TV, am I? With this ridiculous voice and my bow tie...’ Weirdly, the result is sexy; vulnerable rather than oleaginous.

At home in Fulham he has a cabinet of curiosities including a stuffed hoopoe, Haitian voodoo dolls and dinosaur poo. (His supplier is Emma Hawkins, of Hawkins & Hawkins.) His other indulgence is bespoke tailoring. He claims not to know how much he earns, leaving that to his accountant. ‘Nicola says I spend money like water, but my only real weakness is suits.’ And buying gloves, ever since the hypnotist Paul McKenna turned his phobia into philia.

I could talk to him all day, but I try to play it cool. ‘I like it that my work is ephemeral, that it will be on the bottom of the parrot’s cage tomorrow,’ he says, and I half believe him. Has writing this memoir worked? Has it eased his anxiety? ‘Nicola says I’m slightly nicer. Slightly calmer. Note the “slightly”.’

As we leave I point out the large amount of leftover smoked salmon he ordered but only nibbled. Isn’t it a waste? ‘It’s no less wasted because it’s passed through your bottom…’ He has either just written this bon mot or is about to. It appears in his Sunday Times TV column four days later. Waste not, want not.

Pour Me: A Life by AA Gill is out now (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in