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Sinéad Morrissey’s memoir certainly presents an upbringing that is very unusual and uncommon in Northern Ireland, growing up in a family with middle-class parents who are diehard North Belfast Communists, but it reflects a more universal experience that I'm sure many have had. On the one hand there's the embarrassment of being different and wishing that you belonged to a 'normal' family who did normal family activities like holidays (and even meals) rather than being taken to the Fête de l’Humanité event where a prominent Soviet official is making a guest appearance. On the other hand there's nonetheless a recognition that there is something special about being part of a close-knit family who have real values and believe in something meaningful, something that they truly believe is about making the world a better place. Having read Anna Burns’s Milkman (not memoir but as close to lived (un)reality here as it gets) and having grown up in Belfast myself in the period...

You don't need to think too hard to figure out that a semi-autobiography by an artist called My Badly Drawn Life has a fair degree of self-deprecation. And bad drawings. The intention, from the random manner that the stories in the book are related, is almost as if Gipi feels embarrassed to give the stories and his life the respectability of beautiful drawings. Although unconventional, he is certainly capable of that - and there are examples of that in the book, mostly in the colour sections - but when it comes to speaking about what a dork he was as a youth, he prefers to leave it sketchy and a bit of a mess. Which sums up those events perfectly. Published in English translation by Fantagraphics, its ideal home, the US publisher often publishing international foreign language translations of works equivalent of the Drawn & Quarterly sad sack loser indies of Joe Matt, Julie Doucet and Chester Brown. Written and drawn between 2006 and 2007, what is special about Gipi is (much l...

If there is one important life lesson you learn as you get older, it's to try to be more generous, understanding and less judgemental about other people as you come to recognise that you can't know what troubles and problems others are living through. That's not entirely the purpose of Arnold Thomas Fanning's memoir on suffering from mental illness, depression and living with a bipolar disorder to give you such pause for thought; to a greater or lesser degree, we all have our concerns, issues, insecurities and regrets, but it certainly helps put your own issues into perspective when you hear about the author's personal experience in Mind on Fire . Having picked up this book from Amazon, I'm aware now through further recommendations that there are many books about coping with mental illness and relating personal experiences of living with mental health problems. What is different in the case of Mind on Fire is that it is an account by someone who was a writer be...

As a fiction writer of some very dark crime novels (the 7th DS McAvoy novel Scorched Earth is one of the bleakest I have read), you wouldn't think that David Mark is the ideal person to write a self-help book with an optimistic outlook on dealing with mental illness. But that's ok because Piece of Mind is not a self-help book but it is nonetheless a book that will certainly help some people (many people if it gets out there) gain a better understanding what a person with mental health issues is going through; whether you are dealing with it yourself or whether you live with someone suffering from depression, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder BPD, OCD or ADHD. That's more people than you might imagine and you wouldn't always know, so Piece of Mind can help you recognise the signs. I mean, you wouldn't think a talented bestselling and seemingly self-confident author like David Mark would suffer from low self-esteem,. depression or indeed such debilitating m...

Before he became a famous film critic for television and radio, Mark Kermode enjoyed – or persevered with – a budding but never quite blooming career as a rock star. How Does It Feel? is Kermode’s memoir of a little known underground music scene of almost-ran bands from the 80s and 90s, a book that the publisher describes as ‘self-deprecating’ and anyone who has listened to Mark Kermode, knows that he doesn’t take himself too seriously. The impression he gives of himself in his memoir however is of an attention-seeking individual with enough nerve and gumption to bluff his way through whatever barriers are traditionally placed in the way of a struggling musician, particularly one with no discernible talent or originality. Harsh words, and that might sound unfair, but Mark Kermode would be the first person to admit it, and indeed he does, at least in as far as his attempts go to be a famous musician adored by the masses. As a film critic, his credentials, encyclopedic knowledge and his...

Comedy is a very subjective thing. I’ve never read David Sedaris before, but I’m assured by Jonathan Ross that he is “the funniest writer alive today”, the Guardian think he’s “brilliantly clever, inventive and funny”, and the Spectator call him “one of the biggest comedy writers of his generation”. If you don’t trust back-cover blurb endorsements, well the evidence is there that Sedaris has a huge following for his books and his appearances on the literary circuit. Me? Well, I don’t think my quote of “Meh’ will feature on the back of the next book. On the other hand, that was merely my initial reaction to Calypso , perhaps expecting a little too much from all these high claims about David Sedaris as a comedy genius. By the time I’d finished the book, finding myself drawn in and getting through the book surprisingly quickly, I had warmed to his style a little more. Still not a ringing endorsement, I know, so maybe it’s worth looking a little more closely and seeing if we can come up wi...

A record of visits to some of the darkest places of the world, to the scenes of historic atrocities and human suffering, Tragic Shores is not the usual subject matter you expect from a travel memoir, certainly not from an author of this name. Surprisingly however, crime thriller writer Thomas H. Cook's fascination with visiting some of the saddest places on Earth over decades of travel is not all as grim and depressing as you might think, each of the locations visited offering unexpected moments of reflection, personal introspection and collectively a wider perspective on the history and the nature of humanity. Tragic Shores , for example, opens with pilgrimages to two contrasting sites of human misery; Lourdes and Auschwitz. The connections and the comparisons between these two locations are valid, both places being a focus of human suffering and pain, and as such, places that can't help but be defined, affected and tainted by their history. Reflecting on the vulgarity of the...

Maybe it's because we're close to the same age, but I was won over to Sylvia Patterson's memoir of her days as a music journalist by a statement early in the book I'm not with the band ; " The post-punk era, roughly '78 to '83 ", she opines " was arguably the most richly dynamic of all musical time ". You don't need to take Patterson's word or mine to see the validity of this viewpoint, as the current BBC Four re-runs of Top of the Pops from this period at the very least highlight the contrast between what came before and what we now know followed. Unfortunately, Patterson's career as a music journalist starts out on Smash Hits in 1986, by which stage pop music was in terminal decline or had at least stagnated into manufactured pap of Stock Aiken Waterman, Bros and Brother Beyond. Or had it? Patterson's memoir presents a welcome opportunity to re-evaluate a period of pop music neglected for the nostalgia for the boom years of ...

I should mention upfront that Roger Keen is a friend – at least in the Facebook sense if not of the "inner circle" type that he refers to in his book – and I have met him a couple of times. This is not as an excuse for giving his book a favourable review, which it richly deserves on its own merits (I purchased it myself and didn't not receive it as a gift or with the expectation of a review), but to point out that Roger, as anyone who knows him or has perhaps even read one of his film reviews on the internet will testify, is ever inch the perfect gentleman. Quiet, polite, soft-spoken, gracious and congenial with an intelligent and positive outlook, reluctant to criticise when there are favourable points that can be made – Roger is nothing, in other words, like the paranoid, LSD-tripping, dope-smoking, alcohol-fuelled aggressive, surrealist, hippy dopehead artist of the 1970s that he writes about in The Mad Artist , a fictionalised memoir of a past that I suspect that few ...

The first few chapters of Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It  are quite confusing and you are not really sure what kind of book you are reading or where exactly it is going. It is not exactly a travel book, although Dyer takes us to a different location in each chapter - Amsterdam, Cambodia, Rome, Libya. While the surroundings are important, the real journey is going on inside the author’s head as Dyer unselfconsciously looks inward, looking for meaning in his life. Like a dislocated road movie, there appears to be no progression, development or destination in sight, the book as fragmented as the mind of the author himself as it jumps from location to location. Relationships are a prominent theme, although the book doesn’t have a cast of characters that stray beyond each individual chapter, each chapter in a different place and a different exploration of ideas. It appears fragmentary and aimlessly drifting, but it is not without a plot. It clearly has a central theme ru...