100 pages in and so far it has mostly been pretty harrowing descriptions of the casual brutality of post-war working class life and soul-crushing 'education' in northern England alternating with some of the best writing about what music can do to a human being, MEAN to a human being, ever written.
It has its flaws in that it is clearly penned by a self-taught Irish/northerner from a ravaged, poverty-stricken, red-brick wasteland, and as such has not the slickness and sheen of journalistic prose. A trustworthy editor may have improved a number of passages here and there. He likes alliteration a little too much, which I've never been fond of, & which gives the average sentence a strange sing-song quality and structure all its own. There is no way in hell this book was ghostwritten.
But then this is the books greatest strength, too. As with his passions, his politics, his sexuality, he is not 'this' or 'that', does not belong 'here' or 'there', he exists between the temporary meaning of all those words, all those labels, and it is this place he steadfastly attempts to write from in trying to explain himself and the felt experience of his life. That he achieves at all in this impossible mission would be enough for me to want to recommend the book to everyone I know, but that he makes his stand with such humour, passion and courage makes me want to press it into the hands of anyone with half a heart left to feel.
I thought at first, when I saw that it was going to be put out as a Penguin Classic that this was just another of Morrissey's whimsical appropriations of the things he loves, like getting EMI to reopen the "His Master's Voice" label up again just for him. But having got only a fifth of the way in, it seems eerily prophetic, as this is a truly great autobiography, and its very existence in the physical world feels momentous, like finding the lost journals of Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde.
Human, all too human, but worth more than a thousand of his detractors even now, the man's a national - no, international - treasure. As history shall duly record.
It has its flaws in that it is clearly penned by a self-taught Irish/northerner from a ravaged, poverty-stricken, red-brick wasteland, and as such has not the slickness and sheen of journalistic prose. A trustworthy editor may have improved a number of passages here and there. He likes alliteration a little too much, which I've never been fond of, & which gives the average sentence a strange sing-song quality and structure all its own. There is no way in hell this book was ghostwritten.
But then this is the books greatest strength, too. As with his passions, his politics, his sexuality, he is not 'this' or 'that', does not belong 'here' or 'there', he exists between the temporary meaning of all those words, all those labels, and it is this place he steadfastly attempts to write from in trying to explain himself and the felt experience of his life. That he achieves at all in this impossible mission would be enough for me to want to recommend the book to everyone I know, but that he makes his stand with such humour, passion and courage makes me want to press it into the hands of anyone with half a heart left to feel.
I thought at first, when I saw that it was going to be put out as a Penguin Classic that this was just another of Morrissey's whimsical appropriations of the things he loves, like getting EMI to reopen the "His Master's Voice" label up again just for him. But having got only a fifth of the way in, it seems eerily prophetic, as this is a truly great autobiography, and its very existence in the physical world feels momentous, like finding the lost journals of Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde.
Human, all too human, but worth more than a thousand of his detractors even now, the man's a national - no, international - treasure. As history shall duly record.
By Byron
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