DBC Pierre - Middle Years

Middle Years

Pierre's permanent residency in Mexico ended at Reynosa on the United States-Mexican border in the middle of the night when he was stopped trying to import a 6-litre sports car. He intended to drive through the Sonora Desert to Mexico City, but Mexico at the time had a protectionist auto industry, making foreign vehicle imports illegal to all but tourists. Pierre succeeded in crossing with the car but found his papers cancelled by the time he reached Mexico City some 18 hours later. The border crossing at Reynosa is described and celebrated in Pierre's novel Vernon God Little, as is the journey by road from the border.

Pierre asserts that of the following years, nine were spent in a drug-induced haze, culminating with a stay in Australia where he finally collapsed. He described this period of his life in an interview given on the Australian television show Enough Rope with Andrew Denton in 2006:

I was lucky enough to be in Australia at the time, having come back to try my luck. The support network was fantastic. There's immediately the safety net under you here, which, in the rest of the world I wouldn't have survived, definitely. But, here, I was taken into therapy, where they told me that ... I was in the grip of bad psychology, and that this rabbit was never going to come out of the hat and I should get used to the idea, which was what I needed at the time.

During his 20s he had been involved in illegal and unprofitable schemes, including one aimed at mounting a film production to explore the fall of the Aztec Empire and follow trails to the remains of Aztec Emperor Moctezuma, and possibly to his lost treasure, the whereabouts of which remains one of Mexico's great mysteries. He has also confessed to once selling the apartment of an American neighbour in Spain and using much of the proceeds ($34,000) to finance his drug habit, as well as taking possession of a police car in Mexico and using it as his own for many months.

For most of the 1990s, he lived as a recluse; in his own words, "repolarising and deconstructing" himself while listening to Russian and German orchestral music. After years of recovery and patchy employment he wrote his first novel on the floor of a box-room in Balham, south London, finally agreeing a publication deal with Faber & Faber on September 11, 2001. In the following weeks he relocated to a remote mountainside in County Leitrim, Ireland, where he began work on a second novel. The Booker Prize comes with a monetary award of GBP 50,000. Upon being notified of his victory, Pierre said that the money would go part way toward paying off the debts incurred in his 20s, when psychological issues and drug abuse were driving forces.