The Mooresie

Little Big Numbers
OR: Alec – How to be an Artist, and why some stories are just too fucking massive not to be told

As a writer of some of the best autobiographical fiction around, Campbell’s talent for using the right story at the right time has been carefully honed over the years, so it’s no surprise that account of the story of Big Numbers adds to the totality of How to be an Artist. The factors that prevented the series’ completion have just the right mixture of the predictable and the arbitrary, the personal and the financial, to bring Campbell’s narrative home, and you find yourself truly appreciating the depth of Campbell’s craft when you figure this out.

On a third, even more careful reading, however, you realised that How to be an Artist doesn’t just contain the story of the unmaking of Big Numbers, but that it actually is Big Numbers. Or at least, it’s Campbell’s version of it – let’s call it Little Big Numbers, for silliness’s sake.

ALEC: The Years Have Pants has my highest recommendation. At the very least, it’s very thick and will prop open the stoutest of doors.