I Will be Complete by Glen David Gold

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My review of Glen David Gold’s memoir, I Will be Complete (Sceptre), appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. This is, incidentally, my 300th published book review, which may or may not be a significant milestone, depending on how you look at things. Here’s an excerpt:

Most memoirs aren’t written in the epic mode, because life mostly isn’t an epic business. But Glen David Gold has written a memoir that feels as big as an epic. Partly this is a function of sheer size: I Will be Complete is, at 477 pages, a monster. But the epic feel of Gold’s book is also down to the fact that it’s the record of an obsession – the story of Gold’s lifelong attempt to understand his mother, who is also a sort of monster.

The first thing to say about I Will be Complete is that it’s a brave book. “I tell myself,” Gold writes, “that if what I say here is true, I will be complete.” If that sentence gives off more than a whiff of the analyst’s couch, that’s because Gold’s book is at least as much an act of self-therapy as it is a work of art. Driven by an instiable hunger for understanding, Gold pounds away at his subjects – his own misery, and the misery of his mother – with unrelieved intensity. Reading I Will be Complete often feels like paging through Gold’s diary, or eavesdropping on his conversations with his therapist – and this is, at points, literally what we’re doing.