Stewart Lee’s new memoir, AAlcoholic AAnonymous, is an honest, searingly brutal saga of a privileged and educated man in the midst of a relatively short-lived and ultimately self-induced torpor, who repays the world for his undeserved second chance at life with nothing but scorn and contempt. In this extract he writes – for the first time – of the descent into his near fatal addiction to the columns of AA Gill

We’re in a room in a private hospital in the west of London. Today the doctor, holding a copy of the Sunday Times, said: “Have you stopped reading AA Gill’s columns yet? If you don’t, you will destroy yourself.” I’m 45. I have been reading AA Gill columns for 20 years. I think of Welsh lesbian TV presenter baboons, with breasts and vaginas, and vomit into a wastepaper basket. It is the most hopelessly sad and loneliest wastepaper basket I have ever seen.

I met my first wife in a newsagent’s near Wapping. A busted sign above a door opened into a thin newspaper-filled space. The place was coated with nicotine and despair. It was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest newsagents I had ever seen. You handed your money to Fanny behind the counter, a hideously ugly woman with breasts and a vagina like all the others, and she would give you a Sunday Times. Most of the newspaper went to my dog, Langtree, a lurcherly mongrel who lived on sports sections. I kept only what I needed, pure uncut AA Gill, as early on a Sunday morning, as hot off the press, and as near to the source, as possible.

Today was special. AA Gill had written a piece calling the Welsh “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”. It hit the windscreen of my mind like a dying pigeon. It was so thrillingly futile I could taste it, cold and metallic in my hot stumpy mouth. I needed to be alone with the column, next to me in the dark, on my orphan bed, not moving much, just crapping a little.

But my pocket was empty except for an orphan raw steak, a drawing of an old man holding an orthopaedic shoe, and a pirate’s eye-patch. The pocket was coated with nicotine and despair. It was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest pocket I had ever fingered. “Take the paper free,” said Fanny, “and when we get married, I’ll always make sure there’s AA Gill in the magazine rack.” Romantically we peaked too soon.

The flat was in the basement of a terraced house in Wandsworth. A living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen, a small garden, a television, hot and cold running water, bedding, carpets, working radiators, cupboards, doors, some storage space, a sink, an oven, a fridge, a table, some windows, and an orphan chair. There was a Welsh dresser pushed up against the wall. It was a loquacious, dissembling, immoral, lying, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, and pugnacious little Welsh dresser. It was coated with nicotine and despair. It was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest Welsh dresser I had ever seen.

I didn’t mind the terrible hardship of Wandsworth. I had been to boarding school. We couldn’t really afford school fees and St Crispin’s were particularly excessive, but somehow my parents found a few spare tens of thousands down the back of a sofa. A busted sign above a door opened into a thin bed-filled dormitory. A horrible, foul, stinking matron, with breasts and a vagina, showed me my bed. I lay down, not moving much, just crapping a little. The bed was coated with crinoline and despair. It was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest bed I had ever seen. Educationally, I peaked too soon.

One night in our Wandsworth gulag I had been bingeing on pure undiluted Gill, reading for the first time a 2009 column I had missed, about Gill shooting dead a disgusting baboon, with breasts and a vagina, despite knowing full well there was absolutely no excuse for killing her. Gill wrote that he killed the animal to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone”.

I expect Gill would have ended up in bed with the baboon, not moving much, just crapping a little, coldly traversing the great hairy bosoms of its corpus incognita. But he had already killed it, only to be haunted years later by the orphan memory of its monkey body, the texture of cool brown hessian.

The column was coated with nicotine and despair. It was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest AA Gill column I had ever read. During the night, I rose and carved a cabbage into the shape of AA Gill’s head with a large French iron cooking knife, heavy as obligation, workmanlike as desperately contentious prose, to another weekly deadline. And I did this in a complete blackout, too shit-arsed with AA Gillstritis to care.

But all that wasn’t the mad thing, the weird thing. The spooky unhinged thing was that I was doing this in my sleep every week, week after week after week, in the cold echoes of absent memories. And it was the next morning that the AA’s, as we AAlcoholics call them, finally came.

I woke up. And there, just there, right on the ceiling, were Clare Balding, whom Gill had called “a big lesbian” and “a dyke on a bike”, and Mary Beard, whom he had said “should be kept away from cameras altogether”. Clever female television presenters hanging on to the ceiling. They were off the netball pitch, out of the roller rink. They weren’t the Shades of Night, they were The Daughters of Eve, and they were huge, the size of Sunday supplements, heavy as guilt. They scuttled. No, clever female television presenters don’t scuttle, they moved with a horrible purpose, their breasts and vaginas and women’s brains coming nearer, nearer and nearer in the orphan night.

And, as I got out of bed in a cold panic of palsied sheets and twisted limbs, the hallucinations took hold and I literally became AA Gill. I was coated in nicotine and despair. I was the most hopelessly sad and loneliest newspaper columnist I had ever seen. The bed became a trampoline and I lay back on it, not moving much, just crapping a little, and waiting to bounce back up again, away from my addictions and my temporary drop in living standards, away away away, to reassume my rightful position of power, wealth and influence in the natural order of things.

A Room With a Stew is at Leicester Square theatre, London WC2 until 8 Jan; stewartlee.co.uk.
Stewart Lee is the curator of next year’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, at Prestatyn Pontins, 15-17 April 2016