Talk:What Am I Doing Here (book)

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BetacommandBot 04:40, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Date of publication

Chatwin died in January 1989 and he had tried hard to keep his serious illness a secret to the media - both its nature (Aids) and the fact that he was being broken down by illness. The infobox says this book was published in 1988, but I've always heard that it was posthumous. My own copy (Picador paperback, 1990) actually says "first published by Jonathan Cape in 1989" and the reviews quoted on the rear cover clearly speak of him as a recently dead man.

Perhaps the volume has a copyright date in some files saying 1988 - the copyright date doesn't always equal first publication date? or it's just a sloppy copyedit from the book being written (some of it) in that year.

Somebody, then, should check with books about him (Nick Shakespeare and others) and publication data from newspapers and libraries - I'm 98% positive the book was published after his death, though some of it was written during 1988. Several pieces in the book, right from the start, discuss his hospital stays and his bouts of illness in a way that really reinforces the fact that he was severely ill. He edited and prefaced the book himself but evidently kept writing and adding small pieces as long as he was able to, likely in a race against his own death. Some of the short pieces even look unfinished, broken off without a proper ending. (e.g. "The Duke of M."). There really isn't much chance that the book appeared in late 1988 - the last thing he would have wanted at that time was a horde of reporters wanting to see him and talk about his illness etc. 83.254.154.164 (talk) 13:26, 10 August 2014 (UTC)