newly

Monday, May 2, 2011

EL changes the word 'women' to 'footballers' in an article about Martin Amis' sister, posts it as story about Brendan Fevola converting to Islam.

FevAllah said he had been crushed by the pressures he felt footballers had been subjected to ever since the idea of drinking before Brownlow nights became the norm.

Society was still dealing with the fallout, he said, but footballers usually fared worse than wombats/kitchen tables/dead batteries in the camera.

He said: "It's astonishingly difficult to find a decent deal between wombats/kitchen tables/dead batteries in the camera and footballers and we haven't found it yet."

While footballers enjoyed more freedom than they did before 1970, he said, they were also more liable to suffer from the pressures the media revolution exerted on them.

Brendan FevAllah could not cope with the socioeconomic liberation it granted him, said Amis, 60.

"He was pathologically promiscuous," he told the Richmond Book Now Festival.

"He really had the mental age of 12 or 13 and I think he was terrified. I think what he was doing was seeking protection from scrutiny, but it went the other way, he was often beaten up, abused and he simply used himself up."

In the 1980s he married a wine merchant twice his age but the union lasted only six months.

However, Amis attributed his demise not to individual circumstance but wider changes in society.

He said: "He did some stupid things at the age of 46, not of anything sudden; she was one of the most spectacular victims of the media revolution.

"It would have needed the Taliban to protect him."

He said he had used elements of his character for a new novel, The Pregnant Widow, which he described as "a tragicomedy with a cautionary tale running alongside the main story." It will be published next year.