I hadn’t realised people were so keen to see Will Self get a drubbing until the reviews came out for his memoir – titled with characteristic perversity, Will, as opposed to the more obviously memoir-ish Self. To be honest, I’d never had strong feelings one way or the other, as Self struck me as an author for people who bang on about Kerouac and Burroughs; given that my favourite writer is Nora Ephron, we were never going to be literary soulmates. But I enjoy his television appearances, and I’m glad TV producers have found someone other than Stephen Fry to fill the public intellectual role. Yet, for the past month, every time an especially vicious review has been published, my phone has lit up with tweets.

People always enjoy a critical savaging, and there’s satisfaction in seeing a smarty-pants taken down a peg. Another reason is his ex-wife, the late and much-loved journalist Deborah Orr, who was a friend of mine. Orr was not shy in sharing her less-than-benevolent feelings towards her ex-husband on her since-deleted Twitter feed, and, as it happens, she also has a memoir coming out next year, Motherwell, already the subject of much advance praise. But tempting as it may be to contrast Orr’s and Self’s memoirs, a more instructive comparison is with the novelist Edward St Aubyn.

Self and St Aubyn were university friends, united by a love of drugs and a performative kind of arrogance. I’ve been intrigued by their relationship since I wrote a profile of St Aubyn for this paper, back in 2007. Whereas the rest of St Aubyn’s circle couldn’t tell me enough about how much they adored “Teddy”, Self all but hung up on me. And now, in Will, we find out why, sort of. Self spends a remarkable amount of time deriding the dress sense (“absurd”) and character (“idiot”) of “Caius” – someone who bears a striking resemblance to St Aubyn – while admitting he was envious of his “elusive quality”, AKA extreme poshness. Alas, it was not to be, and Self ends up cast out by Caius for “lacking both the necessary suiting and the required attitude”. An alternative reason suggests itself on the previous page, when Caius tells Self that his father had sexually abused him. Self’s reaction is to sulk that Caius “got everything, whether they be material things and even these extreme experiences, which, self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good copy”.

Envying someone for being raped as a child is not the greatest of looks. And yet, Self was also right: St Aubyn’s childhood did make good copy. His autobiographical novels, the Patrick Melrose books, are the greatest literary series of the past half century; the first three live on my shelf of best beloved books, alongside Ephron’s Heartburn, David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family In Corduroy & Denim, and Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things. All are memoirs in all but name; done well, personal writing reaches parts other writing can’t.

Yet it has also become an overexploited genre, rendered saggy by narcissism and an assumption that it’s the easy option. Because unless a writer maintains a detachment from their narrative, they’re just monologuing their own therapy session. Both St Aubyn and Self try to do this stylistically – St Aubyn by fictionalising his story, Self by telling it in the third person – but only the former keeps enough distance to give his narrative a breadth, satirical edge and poetic beauty. Self proves the adage that the only thing more boring than hearing about someone else’s dreams is listening to their drug anecdotes, as he lists every bowel movement, every ugly thought, ignoring everything else around him. One of the most common flaws in personal writing is forgetting that you’re supposed to be writing for the reader’s pleasure, not yours.

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Of course, first-person writing is an easy way to grab an audience’s attention; the first piece I wrote for this paper was about anorexia. Yet when writers write too much about themselves, they end up self-cannibalising. The Daily Mail has helped popularise an entire journalistic genre in which women write about their increasingly masochistic experiences, from overeating to extreme cosmetic surgery. That Self envied the copy potential of St Aubyn’s abuse suggests he perhaps missed his calling as a Mail features writer.

Every writer I know has been pushed towards the first-person, or felt its siren call, and book publishers have endless faith in their appeal. I also have a memoir coming out, except mine is about my relatives during the second world war. One editor suggested that I write “a personal essay, about you” to promote it, even though nothing in my life competes with the drama in theirs: “Yeah, they had Auschwitz, but let me tell you about the time I ran out of almond milk on a bank holiday.”

In the best personal writing, the experience is almost irrelevant. My favourite examples are both banal and dramatic: Sedaris learning a new language, and getting thrown out of home for being gay; St Aubyn on the horrors of smalltalk, and childhood trauma. “Everything is copy,” Ephron said, and she was right, because good personal writing is about life itself. It’s only pointless when it’s just Self-involved.