Just Ignore Him, by Alan Davies

If you don’t already know how Alan Davies is, you might never stumble across this book. If you do know Alan Davies as an English comedian and actor, best known as quirky amateur detective Jonathan Creek, and long-time permanent panelist on the quiz QI (as himself), you might pick this up expecting the usual comedian autobiography/memoir. Some touching/funny/troubling stories from childhood and youth, anecdotes about getting into show business, pithy and amusing observations on life.

THIS IS NOT THAT BOOK.

It’s a very good book, and one I’m very glad to have read (or listened to, actually) but it’s very important to know what you’re getting into. Davies has apparently done the light, funny-observations memoir thing before, in a book called Teenage Revolution which I haven’t read, but a series of events which he outlines in Just Ignore Him led him to revisit his childhood and teenage years and write a much more honest memoir about the emotional, physical and sexual abuse he experienced from his father after his mother died when Alan was just six years old. This books is raw, painful, often difficult to read or listen to, but it is an unforgettable depiction not just of childhood abuse, but of the difficult decisions around how, as an adult, you’re going to process and deal with that abuse. There are definitely funny moments in here, but they are in the minority as the subject matter is very serious and is treated with the seriousness it deserves. Not an easy book by any means but a powerful one.