He wants to come round and put stickers on his stuff! Will Self ’s wife on their very bizarre divorce
HE is the writer and broadcaster who once took heroin in the toilet of former prime minister John Major’s plane.
His wife is a serious journalist for left-of-centre publications.
But yesterday the divorce between Will Self and Deborah Orr turned astonishingly bitter.
Self, 56, faces accusations that he is demanding access to his former home – after three years away from it – to put stickers on ‘his’ belongings. He has also been hit by claims of ‘mental cruelty and adultery’.
Ms Orr, 55, tweeted: ‘My ex wants to divide up the contents of the former marital home by coming round, when I’m not there, putting a red dot on absolutely anything he wants, then getting me to organise it all into a place where he can have it picked up. Anyone else had this?’
Her followers then weighed in with their support, and Ms Orr detailed further allegations of unreasonable behaviour by Mr Self, who she claims has compelled her to put their home on the market for around £1.5million.
It also emerged that she had earlier published a letter from her husband to her lawyer in which he claimed Ms Orr was ‘suffering a protracted mental breakdown’, and refused to co-operate with her attempt to divorce him.
Mr Self, renowned for his loquacity, was last night uncharacteristically lost
‘I changed the locks a long time back’
for words as he declined to make any comment on the spat.
She, meanwhile, continued to hold forth on Twitter.
When one follower said Mr Self should ease the divorce with some ‘co-operation’, Ms Orr openly poked fun at her estranged husband’s pretentiousness by replying ‘co-operation is not a word long enough for my ex to have any truck with’.
The pair had lived in their south London terrace house since buying it for £300,000 in 1997. Their marriage broke down three years ago and Mr Self now rents a nearby ex-council flat.
Ms Orr, who said she was ‘scared’ by Mr Self’s behaviour, wrote that her estranged husband claims he ‘can’t remember’ which belongings are his and complained that she spent years acting as his housekeeper.
Writing about their split, she said: ‘I changed the locks and talked to a lawyer a long time back.’ And she suggested she was suffering from complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the divorce – meaning she was unimpressed by a recent Radio 4 broadcast on mental health made by her ex. Ms Orr wrote: ‘I have C-PTSD. I wonder why? His “compassionate writings” on mental illness make me want to throw up.’
And she approvingly retweeted one of her follower’s messages which claimed that when a man calls a woman ‘crazy’ it is almost always because she has raised the man’s failings. Ms Orr added sarcastically: ‘Yes. We must keep it quiet when men are s***s.’ Referring to her husband’s red stickers she said: ‘This is a fragment of his outrageous behaviour, believe me. Oh, he has another two-year plan to keep me in misery... I see it all coming but I can never stop it. I’ve given him a list of his things. Simply ignored. They aren’t the things he wants.
‘Normal life for me. I cope. Which annoys him. I’ve been trying to walk away with nothing but trauma. He wants a big finale though.’
Ms Orr went on: ‘I changed the locks long ago. He’s been litigating against me for more than two years, and I’m broke. He’s put the stickers thing in a court order, to be signed by Tuesday or it’s back to court AGAIN. I can’t afford a restraining order.’
And when one fan asked if Self was ‘the man who reduces lovely bookshop people to tears and makes stupid statements to sell his books’, Ms Orr replied: ‘That guy’. She added sarcastically: ‘He’s totes a feminist’.
One supporter wrote of Mr Self’s red stickers on the furniture that ‘He seems to be confusing divorce with Ikea. Tell him there are no meatballs either.’
Mr Self did not rush on to Twitter to defend himself. His literary agent said he would not be making any public comment.
But in the letter from Mr Self to Ms Orr’s lawyer, which his estranged wife has put on Twitter, he wrote that he was refusing to co- operate with her legal team over her demand for a divorce.
In his words, her lawyers had offered him a choice of admitting or contesting either ‘the relatively trivial matter of adultery’, or ‘highly damaging accusations of mental cruelty’.
Mr Self wrote: ‘I am – as you are no doubt aware – a public figure, and this, combined with my estranged wife’s public profile, can be expected – should you and she proceed on the basis of mental cruelty – to result in media attention.
‘I believe this to be damaging to our children, and of no help to Deborah, who I believe to be suffering a mental breakdown.’
Mr Self was sacked by The Observer in 1997 after it emerged he had snorted heroin on John Major’s campaign plane.
The 6ft 4ins writer has been open about his previous use of drugs and visits to crackhouses.