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'Junk Mail', by Will Self - NY Times (free registration required)

As an interviewer, Self is a surprise, not a rude boy or snark artist but a sympathetic ear. He insists it's important that we know how it feels to be the pop swan Morrissey, exhausted by adoration of his fans, or Bret Easton Ellis, who really loves his mother and got a mean review from Norman Mailer. In the weaker pieces, Self's sympathy comes off as mere niceness. More often, though, it is tempered with hard-headed skepticism. Self's homage to Burroughs's novel "Junky," for example, while praising the Gaunt One as a major writer on the plane of Sartre and Camus, skillfully explores every soft spot and blind spot in Burroughs's vision of addiction as an existential metaphor.