To read an extract from Mark Everett's autobiography, click on the links panel, below left

Mark Oliver Everett likes to keep himself to himself. He will take his dog, Bobby Jr, for a walk, but, aside from that, he’s happy staying in all day. Yet, strangely for such a reclusive individual, his life is pretty much an open book.

Until now, that was just a figure of speech, reflecting the fact that Everett’s songs – written and performed under the stage name E, with his band, Eels – have courageously recorded some of the saddest and most traumatic events of his life, including the suicide of his sister, Liz, and the death from cancer of his mother (both documented with painful honesty and musical brilliance on the Eels album Electro-Shock Blues).

Now, however, there’s an actual book.

And a television documentary. And two compilation albums. Taken together – and they’re all available this month – they sum up his life and career so far. “I’m not someone who likes to look back,” he says, “but it’s useful to clear the decks.” He adds that the simultaneous emergence of book, documentary and albums is pretty much a coincidence. “Universal has wanted to do a best-of for a while, but I wanted to wait until I had time to do it properly. The book came about in a pragmatic way.”

Everett had just finished his Eels with Strings tour; having gone twice round the world with a larger-than-usual seven-strong group, he “really had the desire to do something that just relied on myself for a while”, he explains. “One of my best friends has been pestering me to write a book for years, so I thought this would be a good time. Writing sounds so easy, but it turned out to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I’ve learnt now why all the great writers are alcoholics.

“Every time I venture out of the world of songwriting and recording, I think, ‘This will be such a relief.’ Then I find everything else is harder. But now that there’s all those years wrapped up in a package, it’s a great feeling. Everyone should do it.”

Things the Grandchildren Should Know offers a typically no-holds-barred account of Everett’s life so far, including the moment when, at the age of 19, he found his father dead. He tried, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him. The shock and trauma is, for him, mixed with surreality – he is actually touching his father, a man so emotionally removed from his children that Everett has, until this point, considered him essentially as an item of furniture in the house.

The harrowing stuff is lightened both by an engaging writing style and by a series of illuminating revelations. Everett accepts the irony that “the grandchildren” may never know these things. So far, he doesn’t even have children. He married Anna, a Russian dentist he met at a health farm, in 2000, but the marriage ended five years later. Now 44, Everett is single again. He explains the demise of his marriage, and of other relationships, by referring to the title of chapter nine – “I Love Crazy Women”. Still, in lieu of grandchildren, we’re happy to learn, for example, that, up for an acting role, Everett was coached by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Unfortunately, Everett is cagey about what she actually taught him. “I’m not sure she’d want me to reveal her secrets,” he says, but when pressed, does mention: “She told me never to rehearse my lines in front of the mirror, because it makes you self-conscious. I think I can tell you that. I don’t think that’s the whole basis of her success.”

We also learn that the sound of Eels was hugely influenced by hearing Portishead on the radio. “It reminded me of the fun I used to have making strange little sound collages on a tape recorder for my sister,” he says. “I realised when I heard Portishead that I could incorporate some of that spirit in my songwriting. In my mind, there were endless possibilities.” Everett launched immediately into a flurry of activity that produced favourite Eels tracks such as Novocaine for the Soul, Susan’s House and My Beloved Monster. The last of these is one of his many songs to have reached a wider audience via movie soundtracks, with Everett’s unflinching world-view – “She will always be the only thing / That comes between me and the awful sting / That comes from living in a world that’s so damn mean” – proving no obstacle to the track appearing in Shrek.

Those early songs can be found on Meet the Eels, a first best-of collection, which also encompasses Mr E’s Beautiful Blues, It’s a MotherF***er and my favourite Eels song (and title), I’m Going to Stop Pretending That I Didn’t Break Your Heart. A stunning collection (I should declare an interest: I wrote the sleeve notes), it underlines that if you’re looking for songwriters who consistently combine raw emotional honesty with invincible musical hooks, then you have to rank Everett alongside John Lennon and Kurt Cobain. That’s how good he is.

Longtime fans will prefer Useless Trinkets, a rarities collection of two CDs and a DVD that includes many of the band’s radical live reworkings, some excellent covers (notably, Prince’s I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man and a feedback-drenched If I Was Your Girlfriend) and both Eels Christmas singles (shop early for next year).

If you missed the documentary Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives when it aired on BBC4 in November, and have since been badgered by friends telling you how great it was, you get another chance to see Everett try to come to terms with his father’s life when the BBC repeats it later this month.

Hugh Everett III was a physics genius who, it is increasingly believed, solved the most puzzling problem associated with quantum mechanics: that very, very, very small particles don’t behave the way the rest of the universe does; that they seem to be both wave and particle at the same time (apologies to people who really understand this stuff). When Everett was studying, the accepted answer to this quandary, proposed by Niels Bohr, was that two contradictory things might be happening, but only when you observed what was happening did anything happen at all. The absurdity of this position was highlighted in the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment, in which a cat is put in a box (this is all hypothetical): depending on the state of a subatomic particle, the cat will either live or die. In Bohr’s world, the cat can’t actually be dead or alive until we open the box and find out. Everett’s many-worlds theory suggested that, in fact, the cat was both dead and alive in two separate, parallel universes.

Okay, these theories sound equally crazy to you and me, but Everett’s is becoming increasingly popular with scientists (and in popular culture). Back in the 1950s, however, he made the mistake of confronting Bohr face to face, and his ideas were – unsurprisingly – rejected.

The documentary, which shows Mark Everett tracing his father’s life, learning about his theory and realising how the rejection of his genius turned him into the cold, bitter man he knew, is heart-tugging stuff. “To be that smart and to have the regular chimps ignore you . . .” Everett muses now. “If he’d gotten some encouragement, what might have happened? But he didn’t, and it pretty much ruined his life.”

Everett described making the documentary as “awkward, painful but transformative”. “When they first came to me, the idea gave me a pain in the pit of my stomach. When they showed me the finished programme, I liked both the people in the film.

“Also, it was conveniently timed in terms of my ego. If it had happened a few years back, I would have felt like the Julian Lennon of physics. Now I’ve had some success myself, meeting all these people who admire my father’s work – it’s the icing on the cake.”

He seems to have found a degree of contentment after some harrowing years. “I’m at a nice point. I don’t have a struggle right now. It really was character-forming, but I sometimes felt that the intensity could have been turned down a couple of notches and that would have been okay.”

Having told the story of his family in such detail in various media, he’ll need to look elsewhere for songwriting subject matter, I suggest. “Yeah, I don’t need to do any more of that for a while.” He takes a moment to let that thought sink in. “I guess I need another family to write about.”

With anthologies and autobiography wrapped up, he is looking to the future now. He has finished a new album and is working on another. “I do hope I’ll be around in 40 years to write volume two. My goal is that that will be a really boring book.”

We know what he means, of course, but Eels fans know the likelihood of Everett creating anything to which the word “boring” might apply is pretty remote.

Things the Grandchildren Should Know is out on January 17; Meet the Eels and Useless Trinkets are out on January 21 on Universal. Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives is repeated later this month

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