Damien Hirst: why forgetting your twenties is no bar to writing an autobiography

The artist, who's writing his memoir, can't recall 10 years of his life. So? Making it up's lots more fun

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• • Emma John - The Observer, Saturday 8 March 2014 

Now let me think… Damien Hirst in pensive mood at Tate Modern. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Let's pause and observe a moment of sympathy for Damien Hirst's editor: the former bad boy of Brit art has announced his intention to write his autobiography. Once publishers have negotiated whatever bank-breaking sum is necessary to acquire it, they will expect, no doubt, tales of hedonism and vice from the heady days of the YBAs. Unfortunately, an excessive exposure to excess has taken its toll on its subject and Hirst has been forced to admit that there's a 10-year period of his life he can't actually remember. Which is going to make the job of editing his book a particularly thankless one.

For the art cynics out there, those for whom Hirst's works stoke a bonfire of rage, this news may not come as surprise. In fact, it might even be a vindication of their scepticism: especially since his lost decade apparently includes his "formative year"' at Goldsmiths at the end of the 80s. If he can't remember them, how truly defining can they have been? It is just possible that those who deride Hirst's technical skills, lambast his ideas and decry his work as soulless have just found the black hole whose existence they've always suspected.
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