Glad I read it (it's okay)

[Valerie]

I just finished this yesterday and decided that I was quite glad that I stuck with it because it got much better by the half way point. David, of course, is a really funny and smart guy, and you don't need the audio version to hear his voice throughout. It sounds exactly like his Soapbox things. Which, in some ways, was great but often also a bit annoying. LOTS of tangents that were sometimes entertaining but sometimes made me put down the book having decided that he can't stay on topic. In fact, I did put the book down at the end of chapter three and decided I didn't want to continue. But after a few days, I decided to persist and finally (finally!) at page 160 - half way through! - we learn that he eventually turned 20. And finally, enter Robert Webb which I found an enormous relief as it signaled the end of the uneventful childhood stuff.

If I were his editor, I would have told him to cut the first half in half and make the second half twice a long. By the end, he glosses over the most interesting part in just 3 pages. I don't mean the juicy romantic bit (which most reviewers seem to have just skipped to), but the self-doubt part where he implies a drinking problem (only implied) and a serious crisis in his self-identity.

What's weird is that he is consciously aware of the importance of the tragic hero in comedy writing, but seems to have forgotten that it also applies to memoir writing. For most of it, to be honest, I had decided that he was a self-involved narcissist who always got whatever he wanted in life. He makes hay of having to wait two tiny years after graduating before seeing commercial success. Boo-hoo, I thought... and then came smashing success. It made me feel that I had undervalued the excellence of Jon Richardson's 'It's Not Me, It's You' ... which, I still think is a way better book specifically because Jon allows himself to be seen as a tragic figure with a tragic flaw. David is very reluctant to do this and for most of the book he seems to make only self-conscious pseudo attempts to show weakness without really having to do so. He doesn't even talk about any psychological issues surrounding his back (despite the title, he bizarrely glosses over that).

Having said that, by the end, thanks to one little chapter, he did manage to let a little crack in the veneer of his self assurance come through and, though that part could have been much longer, it still saved the book in my eyes. By the end, I felt the story was tragic, that he does have a vulnerable side and so I came to like him again. So I'm glad I finished it.

As a side note, though David would absolutely hate this, as a serious astrologer it is also a fascinating study in natal astrology because he is a textbook Moon in Taurus/Sun in Cancer with his endless nostalgia for childhood and absolute stubborn resistance to change. Using information at the end of the book, I have guessed his birth time as being 3:30 a.m., take but not give 15 minutes. (That is my bit of revenge for the mean things he says about astrologers... we're not all charlatans. He just doesn't understand the science is all.)

[Luke]

Interesting points here. I really enjoyed the book, I thought it was interesting and funny. I completely agree with the points you made about him not coming across as sympathetic, he doesn't seem to have a had a difficult life but yet whines about it. It seems a bit ungrateful. Although saying that, can every memoir be a personal and painful struggle? Some people have had good lives, which might not make for a gripping read but just a light and enjoyable memoir of someone with a bad back.

[John]

The problem, for me, with the celebrity auto-biography is that they - the celebrities - are living a fiction and have usually had very ordinary and pretty uninteresting real-lives. I like Mitchell's TV persona and I know I've read this book but other than the walking around London theme, I can't remember anything about it. I do remember that I did finish it, which I can't say for the Jon Richardson effort; there are a limited number of ways to say the same thing and retain any degree of interest. Or perhaps that was a literary way of demonstrating his disorder in which case I suppose it was a bit clever, but still not very interesting.