"Departure(s)" by Julian Barnes

Although this has a story in the heart of it, an account of the relationship of two friends which is, so far as I can judge, true except for the changing of names, this is a memoir, rather than a novel, although he describes it as fiction. Autofiction? But not really. In five parts, Barnes considers getting old and dying in a sort of meandering, digressive exploratory disquisition. He promises this will be his last book. 

Selected quotes:

• “My memory - that place where degradation and embellishment overlap.” (part 1)
• “Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material.” (part 2)
• “Stephen was - is - was - tall and gangling. His trousers often seemed too short for him, flesh showing above his socks, and when he threw his arms about he appeared to be heading off in different directions at the same time.” (part 2)
• “Marriages are like kitchens. ... The first time you put a kitchen in, there's always something wrong with it. Sink in the wrong place, freezer next to the oven. Not enough drawers, too many shelves, and so on. ... Then the second time you rectify the mistakes of the first one, and get what you wanted.” (part 4)
• “An English suburban teenager ... My flesh didn't seem at all sad to me (or at least, only sad from under- rather than over-consumption).” (part 5)
• “When, in the plenitude of her existence, my wife was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and was dead thirty-seven days later, I raged against the dying or her light, but I didn't imagine that some cunningly concealed fairness or justice came into the matter.” (part 5)
• “As you get older, you get hardened in your least acceptable characteristics.” (part 5)
• “You’re allowed to be old, but you’re not allowed to behave like an old person.” (part 5)

This may be somewhat self-indulgent but it is intelligently and elegantly written and contains some perceptive insights into the human condition.

April 2026; 158 pages

Published by Jonathan Cape in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Also by Julian Barnes and reviewed in this blog:

• England, England: a comic novel
• The sense of an ending: a novel

"A Moveable Feast" by Ernest Hemingway

The classic manual on how to be a writer living in Paris.

In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway moved to Paris with his first wife, Hadley, and baby son, gave up journalism and tried to eke out a living writing short stories. This memoir, based on notebooks he had stored in the basement of the Ritz hotel in trunks made for him by Louis Vuitton, describes his life surrounded by other writers and how he learned to write. 

If, like me, you want to be a writer, this is fascinating stuff. But it's also a roll-call of literary celebrities from James Joyce (author of Dubliners, Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) to F Scott Fitzgerald (author of The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and The Last Tycoon), Ford Madox Ford (author of The Good Soldier and the Parade's End tetralogy), Ezra Pound (a major influence on The Waste Land by T S Eliot) and Gertrude Stein among others. 

It is particularly funny about FMF: not only did Hemingway think him smelly and dishevelled: “I always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple). FMF also made inaccurate statements, sometimes lying, sometimes contradicting himself, but always insisted that what he was saying was correct. An example is when he misidentifies Aleister Crowley as Hilaire Belloc.

FSF is more tragicomic: he is ridiculous but doomed to die young having failed to fulfil his immense promise: “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he only remembered when it had been effortless.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Through it all, Hemingway is learning to write:

• “I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made ... and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know’.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “She had also discovered many truths about rhythms and the uses of words in repetition that were valid and valuable.” (Miss Stein Instructs)
• “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen your story and make people feel something more than they understood.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• He regards Ezra Pound as “the man who believed in the mot juste- the one and only correct word to use - the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives.” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• Re Dostoevsky: “How can a man write so badly, so unbelievably badly, and make you feel so deeply?” (Evan Shipman at the Lilas)
• “I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all my facility and try to make instead of describe.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

He's obviously serious about his writing. At one stage he talks about terza riruce. I had to look this up. It is a rhyme scheme derived from terza rima, the form Dante used in his Divine Comedy, which uses triplets and rhymes aba bcb cdc ded ... etc. Terza riruce was originally just terza rima used for comedic or scatological purposes but it evolved into a distinct form: aba dab ado, ‘o’; being an anti-rhyme using vowels and consonants unconnected with others in the sequence. Hemingway obviously knows all this but wears his learning so lightly that he merely mentions the word.

The selected quotes show how the Hemingway style excels: 

Selected quotes:

• “She was very pretty with a face fresh as a newly minted coin if they minted coins in smooth flesh with rain-freshened skin.” (A Good Cafe on the Place St-Michel)
• “The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.” (The False Spring)
• “All the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” (Hunger Was Good Discipline)
• “In those days many people went to the cafes ... to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.” (Ford Madox Ford and The Devil's Disciple)
• “It was a very Corsican wine and you could dilute it by half with water and still receive its message.” (With Pascin At The Dome)
• “Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.” (Ezra Pound and His Bel Esprit.)
• “The whores in Kansas City, who were marked for death and practically everything else, always wished to swallow semen as a sovereign remedy against the con[sumption].” (The Man Who Was Marked For Death)
• “For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle.” (An Agent of Evil)
• “The mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more.” (Scott Fitzgerald)

Other Perspectives:

I recently read Mrs Hemingway by Naomi Wood which chronicles each of Ernest's four wives. The first, Hadley, is the one to whom he was married at the time of AMF. He left her following an adulterous affair with, and subsequent marriage to, Hadley's best friend Fife; Ernest regrets this betrayal towards the end of AMF, saying: “All things truly wicked start from an innocence.” (There Is Never Any End To Paris). There is no doubt that he was a selfish husband and probably an unpleasant man. There are a lot of writers in this blog who were seriously flawed human beings; I am of the opinion that their works should be judged in isolation from their lives. 

Hemingway won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature

December 2024; 182 pages

First published (posthumously) in 1964

My paperback edition published by Vintage in 2000

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Filming If ...." by David Wood

If .... (with four dots, apparently) was an avant garde and frequently surreal film made in 1968 directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. It was set in a boys' public school which was intended as a metaphor for Britain at the time. The system is rotten and corrupt. Three of the senior lads rebel and, with a girl met in a transport cafe, stage an armed attack on guests assembled for Founder's Day. The film proved quasi-prophetic, being filmed (though not released) weeks before the French students rioted in Paris and young people across the western world rebelled against the establishment. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

I was only eleven. when If.... premiered. I came to the film late, when I was at a boarding school in many ways identical to the one shown in the film; I first encountered the film as a published screenplay in the School Library. It was one of many influences which prompted me (already a square peg in a round hole) to rebel against my surroundings.

David Wood was a young actor who played one of the rebels. This short memoir describes how he was chosen for the role and gives a blow by blow account of the filming. It ends with a 'where are they now?' He himself has had a long career acting, mostly in theatre, and writing playscripts and some filmscripts mostly for productions aimed at children; he wrote the screenplay for the 1974 films of 'Swallows and Amazons' whose filming is described in Sophie Neville's memoir The Secrets of Filming Swallows and Amazons.

Filming If .... is a well-written account of the production of a film that has achieved cult status. 

November 2023; 83 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A World Away: A Memoir of Mervyn Peake" by Maeve Gilmore

 Gilmore was the widow of Peake, the author of Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and other books, who was also a poet, a painter and a very talented illustrator. 

As a biography, this doesn't really work. I was trying to use it as a source to write a potted biography of Peake's life and the lack of dates made this book difficult to use; we don't even know when he was born; it starts with Gilmore's first sight of him when they were together at Art School, she as pupil, he as teacher. 

But if we don't get the facts we get a lot of the feelings. Their life together was one of artistic poverty in London flats (in those days it was cheap to rent in London!) and remote rural cottages (and on Sark). They were financially impoverished but they knew Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene and Laurence Olivier and Anthony Quinn. They brought up their family and created.

And then Mervyn starts suffering from a brain disease, perhaps Parkinson's, perhaps early-onset dementia (aged 46). Treatment includes a spell in a mental hospital, with ECT, and brain surgery. Clearly, an illustrator can't have shaking hands. Clearly, a writer needs to be able to remember things. And so, in desperate sadness, the author records the slow decline of her brilliant husband.

Selected quotes:

• “When one is unsure everyone else seems perfectly at ease” (8)
• “How could one know what love was, before living it? How could one know what life was, before loving it?” (20)
• “We saw a great deal more of England than we should have done if he or I had been more of a map reader.” (111)
• “I have played too much around the edge of madness.” (122)

February 2023; 142 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"On Chapel Sands" by Laura Cumming

 A gently meandering memoir about the author's mother's childhood in a tiny Lincolnshire seaside village; drifting reminiscences in the style of Cider with Rosie but less lyrical; I often drifted away.

The hook is that the author's mother was abducted from the beach when she was three years old and discovered a few days later. The second hook is that the 'parents' from whom she was abducted were not her birth parents; she had been unofficially adopted at the age of three. There is here the makings of a potent human interest story, but these two hooks are dangled repeatedly as unrefreshed bait in the way a cheap television programme keeps on telling you what is coming up so that you don't turn over during the commercial break. My frustration was not soothed  by the way that  the author flips backwards and forwards between her own narration and the quoted narration of her mother; this is not always clearly signified (often just by a slight change in paragraph indentation) and I found myself confused, from time to time, as to which 'mother' and whose point of view I was following.

The subtitle is 'My mother and other missing persons'; I missed the other missing persons. Where were they? The focus seems entirely on the author's family, plus a smattering of art criticism. 

I found this stodgier than it should have been.

There are a couple of interesting 'facts' which seem doubtfull:

• The author claims that during WWII to Norwegian King lived in exile at Ingoldmells on the Lincolnshire coast near Skegness. This doesn't seem to be the fact. According to wikipedia, the Norwegian Royal family lived in London and Berkshire while in exile. The wikipedia entry on Ingoldmells doesn't mention the Norwegians.
• The author also states that her father taught life drawing classes and his models included an old man who once posed for Eros and a young man called Sean Connery. Wikipedia gives the name of the Eros life model as fifteen-year-old Angelo Colarossi ... who seems to have lived in later life as a solicitor's clerk in West London and was buried in Feltham in 1949 which seems to make it unlikely that he would have been available for modelling in Edinburgh.

Selected quotes:

• "The dead may be invisible, but they are not absent; so writes St Augustine." (Ch 1)
• "She taught me how to remember paintings ... first draw the frame, then summarise the main shapes and volumes in rapid thumbnail." (Ch 1)
• "Perhaps experience develops into memory like a photograph, its latent imprint invisible to us until finally fixed by conversation." (Ch 3)
• "I have never felt able to represent myself in speech, only through the merciful slowness and forgiving second chances of writing." (Ch 4)
• "What is sand but the pulverised past, ancient history in billions of particles?" (Ch 8)
• "George only appears happy in rare shots with men. He never smiles in the company of Veda or Betty." (Ch 12)

June 2022; 297 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Road to Middlemarch" by Rebecca Mead

 Subtitled "My Life with George Eliot" this book is part personal memoir, part literary biography, and part literary analysis of Middlemarch and George Eliot's other works. It is structured so that the chapter headings correspond to the names of the Books in Middlemarch.

I have read Middlemarch and found it heavy going but this book has inspired me to read it again.

It's very readable and shows considerable insight into the book. It does the usual thing of trying to equate characters with people (was the then Rector of Lincoln College Oxford whom  the model for Casaubon whom Eliot knew?: he had married late and unhappily to a much younger wife, his most ambitious book was never completed and he wrote a book about Renaissance scholar Isaac Casaubon) and fictional places with real places (was Middlemarch based on Coventry where Eliot lived for a while?: it had new hospitals and a new railway station at the right time).

It notes one or two inconsistencies (mistakes?) in the text:

• It treats Dorothea's being an orphan with scant regard and is vague about when they died, saying it was when Dorothea and her younger sister were “about twelve years old" though they can’t both have been.
• It points out that “For all Dorothea's purported longing to be learned she doesn't take much effort to educate herself, even though she has access to her uncle's no doubt well-stocked library.” (C 1)

But it is particularly interesting when Mead makes observations pertaining to the craft of the novelist:

• She sees Middlemarch as Eliot’s “ ingenious revision of the marriage plot. What might happen if, if instead of ending with a wedding, a novel were to begin with one.” (C 1)
• “Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls ... ‘the home epic’ - the momentous, ordinary journey travelled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood.” (C 1)
• Eliot is unwilling "to let one sentence stand for many” (C 2)
• “Eliot’s hold on dialogue is often slack.” (C 2)
• “The explicit intrusion of a narrator’s voice in Eliot's fiction can strike the contemporary ear as old-fashioned.” but Leslie “ Stephen suggests that Eliot's use of the magisterial authorial interjection is one of the things that make her novels suitable for grown up people. ... By directly addressing us, Eliot draws us deeper inside her panorama. ... We are granted a wider perspective, and a greater insight, then is available to their neighbours down in the world of Middlemarch.” (C 2)
• “It is central to Elliot's novelistic intention that the reader understand the unfolding of events from the perspectives of multiple characters.” (C 5)
• “Strange coincidences do occur in real life as well as in novels, but it is in the plot concerning Raffles and Bulstrode that a reader sees most clearly the machinery of the novelist at work.” (C 7)

It was interesting to me at any rate, having lived in Bedford for nearly thirty years, that when Eliot (as Marian Evans) worked as a journalist on the Westminster Review, living over the shop at 142 Strand, London, a colleague and fellow-resident was William Hale White who would go on to become the similarly pseudonymous (but rather less celebrate) novelist Mark Rutherford.

The character of Casaubon is, I presume, named after the scholar Isaac Casaubon who knew James I and is credited with, among other things, dating the esoteric magical writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, previously thought to date to the time of Moses, to the third or fourth century of the Common Era, as noted by Ross King in his novel Ex-Libris, set at a time roughly contemporary with Casaubon. 

Selected quotes:

• “A book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and desires of youth now seemed to offer a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the parts untrodden and the choices unmade.” (Prelude)
• “Novels are places in which authors explore their own subjectivity.” (Prelude)
• “When I first left England as a young woman, I didn't consider that there would be a finite, and unknowable, number of times I would return. Eventually, though, each goodbye came to be freighted with the possibility that it might be the last.” (Prelude)
• “Once, when given the assignment of writing an essay about God, she [Eliot] sat down and drew a picture of a large, watchful eye.” (C 1)
• “Visiting the former homes of famous writers tends to be a compromised and often unsatisfying endeavour; by contrast with a painter’s studio, the nature of literary creativity is not easily suggested by the sight of creation.” (C 1)
• “Being absolutely sure that one is right is part of growing up, up.and so is realizing, years later, that's the truth might be more nuanced.” (C 2)
• “Only a child believes a grown-up has stopped growing.” (C 2)
• “the always-present threat of futility that looms over any scholarly endeavour.” (C 5)
• “To ... intellectuals of the early part of the twentieth century, Eliot was part of a bygone era that was the better for being gone.” (C 7)

This is a well-written, easily readable yet authoritative, introduction to the work of George Eliot, especially what is regarded as her masterpiece, Middlemarch

George Eliot wrote the following books, reviewed on this blog:

• The Mill on the Floss

December 2021; 278 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Pegasus to Paradise" by Michael Tappenden

 A fictionalised memoir of the author's parents. Ted Tappenden was the radio operator who sent the 'Ham and Jam' message reporting the capture of the bridges outside Caen in the 'Pegasus' operation, the first in the allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Like many men after the war, he suffered from his memories. Florrie, his wife, was a feisty individual who probably suffered from bipolar syndrome. Much of the book is taken up with the strains imposed on the marriage by these two psychologically damaged individuals.

The trouble with memoirs is that they deal with what happened and struggle to conform to the conventions of a novel; for example, the pacing may be uneven and the cast of characters may become unwieldy.  But in this book the author has selected incidents which enable the characters to develop in all their real-life complexity. There are some wonderfully detailed descriptions - a strength of the author - which both add depth and advance the story. And, of course, there is incredible verisimilitude.

All of human life seems to be here. Not only is there the thrilling wartime exploits of Ted but also the frustrations of peacetime. Florrie gets involved in cub scouts, in charity concerts and in an allotment. There is the difficulty of communication between two people even when they are deeply in love. There is a wedding and a funeral, and the slow, sad decline into old age that those of us who do not die too early must face. All is told with love and respect. And, often, humour.

It reminded me of Patrick Gale's Notes From an Exhibition.

Selected quotes:

• "She had fled with her family from the poverty and hopelessness of County Cork for the poverty and possibilities of the East End of London." (C 1)
• "The brown ribbon of road that struggled upwards and sped downwards." (C 1)
• "Pitch-black pain from somewhere so deep, poured out of him." (C 4)
• "in the mirror, she could still see Scarlett O’Hara. Unfortunately, Cyril frankly didn’t seem to give a damn." (C 6)
• "Challenge strode there defiant, knuckle-dustered and dangerous. A swaggering sip of things to come, saturated in a crazy palette of colour like a degenerate peacock." (C 6)
• "It was that time when the day had slowed down its urgency and yawned and stretched before being covered by night." (C 8)
• "Even more alarming was the knowledge that the centre forward was known to have the unusual ability of being able to kick the ball in the direction that he intended." (C 9)
• "Not being normal was such bloody hard work." (C 10)
• "At the window, the spider moved quickly from the shadowy corner to the centre of its web and started to bind a hapless fly." (C 10)
• "‘Come on now Patrick Kellagher. Get down on yer knees an tank God dat you’re still on yer feet.’" (C 10)
• "The stage so full of drama now seemed very empty. Just shadows where the players had been; applause, an uncertain echo." (C 10)
• "Now she looked around her garden. Where were her gleaming jewels? Her wonder? Who had switched off the blazing light and crunched her world into a small, terraced back garden?" (C 11)
• "The mad confusion of plants and hotchpotch collection of figures before her, she had wanted to represent a sanctuary; a place of freedom and choice. Now, she saw they were none of those things. Now, in horror, she saw a heaving mass of tormented vegetation: some strong, some weak; some throttling; some suffocating silently, and some pale with approaching death, but all struggling for survival." (C 11)
• "In front of the plants, stood her figures: plastic, cement and plaster, mute, staring, imprisoned. She had ignored their ugliness, their kitsch-ness, their garish coats and their shocking disfigurements, and had offered them a refuge. But she hadn’t understood, she’d been selfish. They had stood there mutely, frozen by ice, faded by the sun, displaying their disabilities for all to see, to be mocked and scoffed at, to suffer everlasting pain, just to satisfy Florrie. And why did they all seem to have Ted’s face?" (C 11)
• "It was like standing in front of a fridge full of tears." (C 11)
• "Stiff upper lips were notoriously difficult to treat." (C 12)
• "The old people applauded slowly, as if it was an effort. As if they were now running out of applause, running out of everything." (C 13)
• "Maybe he carried the Bible just in case there really was a God. But he’d seen no sign of him." (C 14)
• "The odour of old people hung in the air." (C 17)
• "A number of elderly people sat slumped in plump armchairs that almost enveloped them. They might have been small children sitting on adult’s chairs, except that a small child would be bursting full of tomorrow, and these people were in danger of disappearing forever down the gap between the seat and the back." (C 18)
• "It was a silent drive to the cemetery. Inside the car, the air was thick with thoughts that even the open window could not whisk away." (C 19)

A beautifully written family saga.

Michael Tappenden has also written A Long Dark Rainbow.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A Moment of War" by Laurie Lee

Laurie Lee is best known for his memoir of childhood Cider with Rosie but for my money his later works deserve just as much attention. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning records a journey he made through Spain in the 1930s, tramping and busking with his violin. In this book, dedicated "To the Defeated",  Lee returns to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the International Brigade. It is full of incident. He is arrested as a spy ... three times, each time being imprisoned and expecting to be shot. He describes the shambolic training he underwent and how the ragamuffin soldiers amused themselves during the long periods of inaction. He has several encounters with girls and at least one with a boy (provided by the guards on what he expects will be his last night in the condemned cell). He describes the casual killing of those suspected of being spies, fascists or traitors. During a battle he himself kills a man. So there is plenty of excitement.

But the descriptions. Lee was a poet: his descriptions are lyrical:

• "The guards, in their heavy brown overcoats, began to steam like sweating horses." (Ch 1)
• "I saw the landscape shudder into shape." (Ch 1)
• "It was now about noon, with the sun at its low winter strength, and across the northern horizon the mountains caught it like broken glass, each peak flashing with blue and white light." (Ch 2)
• "Her body met mine with the quick twist of a snake." (Ch 2)
• "The long-forgotten juices of real home-cooked food, swimming aromas of tomatoes, dried beans, and garlic sausage, and boiled chicken peeling on the bone." (Ch 6)
• "We ... were faced by a small brass band like a firing-squad. In the dead morning light they pointed their instruments at our heads and blew out a succession of tubercular blasts." (Ch 3)
• "When a shell hit the ground and exploded near by, the snow rose in the air like a dirty ghost, and hung there spikily billowing, before collapsing into the ground again." (Ch 8)

Selected quotes:

• "I was at that flush of youth which never doubts self-survival, that idiot belief in luck and a uniquely charmed life, without which illusion few wars would be possible." (Ch 1)
• "He didn't like that kind of warfare - mostly hanging about in ditches, then massacre and panic." (Ch 1)
• "the simple, voluptuous appetite of youth when taste was never jaded." (Ch 6)
• "It was one of the coldest nights I could remember. I lay with my hands between my thighs, my clenched teeth chattering, my overcoat crackling with frost." (Ch 8)
• "Under bombardment, the body takes over the mind; it stiffens and melts, the mouth floods and dries, and all one's senses rush to the back of one's neck." (Ch 8)
• "I had killed a man and remembered his shocked, angry eyes. There was nothing I could say to him now. ... Was this then what I'd come for, and all my journey had meant - to smudge out the life of an unknown young man in a blur of panic which in no way could affect victory or defeat?" (Ch 8)
• "It was like taking part in some surrealist chess, where pawns became Kings and Queens without warning, and the value of the pieces changed in mid-play." (Ch 9)

Fabulous. June 2021; 178 pages

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog may be found here. Other books about war may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Meat Rack Boy" by Michael Tarraga

This is a very short memoir.

Abandoned as a baby by his prostitute mother, with his twin brother and two-year-old sister, Michael grew up with foster-parents who systematically abused him from before he was six: he was anally raped repeatedly by his foster-father while his foster-mother prevented him from screaming or struggling. As a child he was forced to have oral sex with his sister while being filmed. His foster-parents rented him out to other men including, so he claims, Ted Heath (before he became Prime Minister).

Unlike the two other rentboy memoirs I have read recently (I am researching a character in a novel I am writing), Making Beds in Brothels and Street Kid, Michael is straight and practises heterosexual sex since  escaping his abusive childhood; the remainder of this memoir (written at the age of 70 and dying from cancer) describes his failed marriages, his drug addiction, his working life, and his crimes.

Simply written.

Some memorable moments:

• “You know Peter, God loves you. But right now I don’t like you very much.” (Ch 5)
• "We have been together for 11 years and have never had an argument, as we can’t be arsed to argue." (Ch 11)

February 2021

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog may be found here. 

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Making Beds in Brothels" by Adam Brock

Following a horrendous childhood, in which he was regularly beaten and possibly sexually abused by his father, a man who exhibited symptoms of mental illness, Adam was raped as a young teenager in a gay bar in Manchester. He became a child prostitute before working as a rent boy in brothels in Amsterdam and London. Somehow he survived. 

In this memoir, Adam reserves his strongest condemnation not for the clients who hired him. “I dislike categorising all those who pay for sex as somehow predatory or deviant; they are drawn from as wide a pool as any other group of humanity.” (C 17) He has compassion even for Mitchell, a long-time friend, who stole from him: “what kind of person steals the crutches from a man with a broken back?” (C 23). He feels that, as a child, he was repeatedly failed by the system. “Three times I went to the austere police station in the centre of Mobberley and reported that my father was abusing me. Three times nothing was done. No social workers were called, no review or check by the police, not a single investigation. All that happened was that each time I was returned to my father, and later received the beatings of my life as a result.” (C 5)

The youth leaders of his gay teenager group encouraged them to go to the bar where he was raped and, later, rented. A teacher refused to discuss his sexuality with him (it was illegal at the time for teachers to 'encourage' homosexuality under section 28 of the Local Government Act). Still well underage, he plied his trade unchallenged: “I regularly worked on the streets, between the age of fourteen and seventeen, and was never once stopped and asked what I was doing by a police officer, not a single time. And I was doing it in broad daylight, in a public area for the entire world to see, often under high spec surveillance cameras.” (C 9) “After escaping my father and moving to Manchester, aged fourteen, I was placed in local authority care with ‘Mad Anne’. Anne had a different man home every other night. Then, at sixteen, there was the city homeless shelter at Downing Street, a square red brick building with dormer roof, long demolished. I was a small, vulnerable kid living with city down and outs; the insane, the hopeless. My abiding memory of that place was simply how scary it was.” (C 13)

Many memoirs suffer from their 'one thing after another' structure (as opposed to novels in which the novelist is able to shape the narrative so that it grows and swells and creates meaning). I didn't notice it so much with this book, perhaps because of the shocking nature of the subject. It isn't strong on the detail of the sex, perhaps because Adam has become a born-again Christian; if you want to know about what goes on between a rentboy and his client I recommend Street Kid by Ned Williams. Both Adam and 'Steven' were sexually abused by their fathers; both identify as gay. Adam has a considerably longer career as a sex worker than 'Steven', perhaps because he spends most of his time in the more controlled environment of the brothel. But he ends up more damaged; 'Steven' starts his narrative with a nostalgic return to the streets and bars where he plied his trade.

The last part of the book describes Adam finding God. It makes interesting reading if you are concerned about the Problem of Evil, the idea that God cannot be both omnipotent and good because people suffer: 

• “There seems no need for a fiery hell elsewhere anyway, because many of us already dwell in it” (C 24)
• “there is a causality between God and sinfulness. Not that God inspires sin, but rather that we are of God and the world is of God, and sin happens through the sinner’s own freewill.” (C 24)
• “Sometimes my relationship with God seems to mirror my relationship with my father. Why does the omnipresent Deity, who ultimately oversees everything, allow me to suffer so much? If I deserve it and I’m being punished, are the words we are fed about a compassionate God who is radically forgiving, meaningless, empty promises meant simply to placate us? Presumably you can’t be both loving and drive someone into an early grave.” (C 27)
• “God says, I oversaw your abuse, you inevitably strayed due to the damage and de-normalisation of childhood trauma, now I’m going to punish you, perhaps till the strain becomes too much. But this is okay, this is the way to your redemption.” (C 27)
• “If hell is redemptive, as someone once told me, then it’s a bitter cup for all of us who have already suffered it.” (C 27)

Selected quotes:

• “Mobberley struggles along the bottom of a narrow valley, the town clawing unsuccessfully up the sides of the Pennines. The terrain halts the spread of development and the town remains low, dense and grey” (C 2)
• “It was a tough, unattractive place, hard on the lungs. You tasted the toxins in air, which gave the atmosphere a soupy, viscous quality that caught in the nostrils.” (C 2)
• “he grinds his strong white teeth into my face, pushing my head hard against them.” (C 3)
• “We didn’t learn the normal ways of regulating anger that children do. We didn’t throw tantrums or disobey in the normal way, everything was suppressed for fear of retribution.” (C 3)
• “for all the religion in that house there was an absolute absence of God.” (C 4)
• “He claimed that during the time he spent at his grandparents, he was aware of the dead that his grandmother invoked and that they tormented him in the dark.” (C 4)
• “Sometimes she forgot to fry the eggs, the yolks floating in viscous clear whites on your plate, frying the peas instead and boiling the chips.” (C 7)
• “Why did I keep going back after he had done so much? Because I was lonely. Because there was security in our familiarity. If I’m honest, I had no one else.” (C 7)
• “It may seem unlikely but If you want to know about good and bad people, ask prostitutes. A prostitute who doesn’t develop a nose for people’s hidden character – for what they are not telling you, or what they actually want as opposed to what they are saying they want – isn’t going to survive very long.” (C 10)
• “I once knew a man, a regular in the Old Reform bar in Manchester, who told me he purposefully supplied his lovers with drugs till they eventually become addicted, and then took pleasure in watching their lives fall apart. What he did was promote behaviour that might lead to these young men’s death; playing with their lives. He justified himself by saying that the men deserved it in some way: that they were using him and this was his means of revenge.” (C 10)
• “Both of us had been handed the sticky end of the lollipop and felt the world owed us something but we owed it nothing.” (C 10)
• “The Earl’s Court of my recollection smells of dust, the stink of the cars. Dust clings heavy to the buildings, trees, streets with the tenacity of lint, like static adhered to laundry.” (C 13)
• “Every surface is covered with thrift store tat” (C 13)
• “Her perfume is her most memorable feature. It is mixture of patchouli, cannabis, stale sweat and the yeasty scent of body parts best not thought of; your nose knows of her presence long before your eyes” (C 13)
• “Would I know if I was dead? How do we know which of us are restless spirits that seek to undo what has been done, to untangle the Gordian knot of our lives?” (C 13)
• “One day you are young, the party is in full swing, then you blink, and everyone has left, and you are forty-nine, working reception in a doss house.” (C 13)
• “This was a business where not taking care of the product, in other words ourselves, was counterproductive. If I was going to survive and thrive, I had to take self-care seriously.” (C 15)
• “Commodification of the individual makes it possible to regard ourselves as any other product that is influenced by supply, demand or quantity.” (C 16)
• “I objectified myself as a means of meeting market requirements; I adjusted my appearance and persona.” (C 16)
• “A good scenario could reduce the time of the ‘massage’ considerably, the customer often becoming overwhelmed by the excitement.” (C 16)
• “We were the equivalent of a gourmet hot dog. Street enough to make the men feel as if they were buying into the ghetto fantasy, but without the risk of developing salmonella.” (C 16)
• “When you were in the sex-worker bubble, you ... lived, slept, socialised and worked in a very small area, so it was easier sometimes just to stay in character. The risk is, that you inevitably lose yourself to a greater or lesser degree, when you live a lie over an extended period of time.” (C 16)
• “There is a click and the room is suddenly brightly lit. The glass door in front of us, which initially looked like smoked glass, becomes an impenetrable mirror, through which we can see nothing other than our selves reflected back. In the darkness of the hallway, however, the customer can see each of us clearly under the bright spot-lights. We pull in our stomachs, pout our lips, predicating the duck face of the ubiquitous selfie by decades, as we try to make ourselves irresistible. A few moments pass. There is a sharp tap on the window, and the lights go out.” (C 17)
• “Being the first is almost talismanic, for it means you can relax – anything else will be gravy. Once you have that first client out of the way, everything will be all right. The anxiety is always that you won’t work that day.” (C 17)
• “There is an old saying about prostitutes, two great years, two okay years and two shit years.” ( 21)
• “My needs were always immediate. The immediate need for accommodation, for money or food. I needed drink and drugs to suppress the inevitable anxiety.” (C 21)
• “I needed to polish off entire bottles of neat whiskey to bring myself down from the drugs long enough for a few hours’ sleep.” (C 23)
• “That morning, suffering from drug-induced psychosis and under the impression I was under attack from demons waiting outside my door, that something that I could hear laughing and cajoling me with murderous intent in their voices was about to enter the room and consume me, I defenestrated myself, in spectacular fashion, hurtling myself out of the third story window, and falling in a shower of broken glass. I felt no fear as I flew through the air, toppling towards the concrete below.” (C 23)
• “I was surrounded by voices of the dead who screamed into my ears, arguing whether I should live or die. I swear that, at that point, I felt as if I was overhearing a conversation taking place around me. That these spirits and others would decide my fate.” (C 23)
• “The most painful lesson you will ever learn is to understand that it is you yourself who is often the chief architect of your own misery.” (C 24)
• “Perhaps death has a quota that needs to be met, and my chance survival has put me on death’s list of escapees.” (C 24)
• “for years I had socialised with those who contributed to my exploitation. I saw these men walking down the street and rather than rushing over to them and screaming in their faces, striking them with my fists, I did nothing. I would sit next to them in a bar, and even nod acknowledgement to them. This normalisation now strikes me as perverse and it’s that normalisation that allows it to continue.” (C 25)
• “when you are hopeless you cling to any possibility that life will improve.” (C 27) Except he didn't. At one stage he tried to kill himself.

Mesmerising reading. December 2020

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed in this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Bad Blood" by Lorna Sage

You might think that a memoir of a childhood in a rural village on the border of Wales would be very like Cider With Rosie and there are similarities in the picture of rural deprivation, although the period of this book is twenty years after Rosie. But the real difference is that this is no rural idyll. It starts by describing her grandfather, the Vicar, and her grandmother, his wife, who hated him, who lived apart from him (in the vicarage) who never went to church and who blackmailed him over his affairs. The tempestuous relationships and the Vicar's philandering cast a long shadow over Lorna's growing up.

It is beautifully written.

She writes beautifully:

• "She was buried in the same grave as him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime's mutual loathing." (C 1)
• "I thought that that was what a vicar was, simply: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space." (C 1)
• "They didn't just 'know their place'. it was as though the place occupied them, so that they all knew what they were going to be from the beginning." (C 1)
• "They were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously." (C 1)
• "My overcoat was at first too big (I would grow into it), then all at once too small, without ever for a moment being the right size." (C 1)
• "Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He rules over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day." (C 2)
• "All housework is futile in the sense that it always has to be done again." (C 3)
• "When they're not breaking the commandments, anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless." (C 4)
• "Jolly miserable: that middle-class oxymoron." (C 4)
• "I was still only an apprentice misfit and self-conscious in the part." (C 7)
• "In the land of the 1950s you were meant to be socially mobile, but personally conformist; self-made, but in one of the moulds made ready. You mustn't miss the boat, but you mustn't rock it either." (C 9)
• "Being an air hostess hadn't yet been revealed as waitressing-in-the-sky." (C 10)
• "The particular awfulness of amateur acting is that you can always see through the disghuise to the person underneath." (C 12)
• "'Poetry for the Young' ... was absolutely silent on animal appetites and contrived to confuse love with waving goodbye to one's native land. Its real subject was death: death in infancy, death in the far corners of the empire, death at sea on the way there - and just plain old death." (C 12)
• "More than one of those tweedy spinsters had had an affair with Grandpa." (C 12)
• "He kept a pair of bicycle clips in his pocket in case someone might want to lend him a bike." (C 12)
• "Only when you look  ore closely can you see that this housewife is pathologically scared of food, hates home, is really a child dreaming of pretty things and treats." (C 12)
• "A few intellectual tearaways at the boys' grammar school talked about jazz and existentialism, but they were practising for university." (C 13)

A great read: idyll with attitude. November 2020; 281 pages

Bad Blood won the 2000 Whitbread (now the Costa) Prize for Biography. Other winners reviewed on this blog include:

• 2007 Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• 2009 The Strangest Man (Paul Dirac) by Graham Farmelo
• 2015 The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf

Other fictional Costa winners can be found here.

Other memoirs and autobiographies reviewed on this blog can be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God