Not only one of the most unique and remarkable literary biographies I’ve ever read, but also one of the most hauntingly successful attempts to reflect and embody a paranoid, schizophrenic mind in all its painful, contradictory brilliance.

Indeed it’s so successful that I had to take a couple of days off from reading it - I woke up in the night a couple of times following dreams in which I “realised” reality is not in fact reality.

It’s painful, often distressing, sometimes exhilarating to be this deep into Philip K Dick’s world. This is a story of confusion, suffering, at times almost intolerable anguish, and frankly staggering (perhaps excessive) insight into the workings of the modern world.

For all its empathy and novelistic brilliance, it’s no hagiography. Indeed, it’s very good on Dick’s appalling misogyny and, more disturbingly, the way that misogyny was enabled by a largely male psychiatric profession.

At one point in his life Dick, aided by the family psychiatrist, was able to hide his own mental illness by... having his wife sectioned, after successfully convincing the authorities she was mentally ill.

Part of the brilliance of the book, though, is that you’re able to see Dick in all his complexity, all his contradictions. The last hundred or so pages are desperately, crushingly sad.

What saddened me most deeply, though, was when I reflected on how deeply pertinent Dick’s paranoid vision has proved to be. His ideas are so deeply embedded in our culture at this point that we barely even think of them as his ideas.

That made me think about the extent to which we value the insights of those who are not neuro-typical, whether that has improved since Dick’s time, or whether in fact our cultural institutions are less open to the significance of madness than ever.

It’s difficult to imagine Dick surviving a writing “career” now, I think. It’s difficult to imagine that we would in any welcome the dark counter image of our reality that emerges when that reality is refracted through a schizophrenic experience.

On a more positive note though, the book does convey something very beautiful, and that’s what happens when, after a lifetime of existing essentially alone in his paranoid world, someone meets him where he is, and briefly shares that reality with him.

Which of course is the deepest question, and one actually at the heart of Dick’s world too. Is it madness that’s painful, or society’s callous, sometimes violent demand that we all share the same definition of sanity?

I should just say though that I do not recommend this book if you’re in any kind of fragile or slightly strange state because it really does go very deep indeed down the “nothing is real, reality is manufactured” wormhole, to the point where it’s actually a bit vertigo inducing.