Popular Culture Review - Volume 26, Number 2 - Summer 2015
“A Word-Slinger’s Delight”:
Morrissey’s Autobiography
Michael A Young, Independent Scholar
The autobiography of Steven Patrick Morrissey, singer-songwriter
and former frontman of 1980s British band the Smiths, has been much
hyperbolically, published as an instant Penguin Classic.1 So much fuss over
a celebrity autobiography written by a popular vocalist and songwriter past
the zenith of his 1980s fame prompts the question: What is the book actually
like? Autobiography is a somewhat unselfcritical, overlong gush of memory,
experience and emotion, which nevertheless succeeds both as a source of
information about topics larger than its author—the North, particularly in the
1960s and ‘70s, popular music, the nature of those Siamese twins success
and failure—and as a translation of life into language that sometimes delights
with its originality and vivid linguistic imagination. If the book has faults typical
of celebrity autobiography—an excess of trivia and fascination with the self
and its obsessions—it is still generally worth the effort of reading.
Autobiography is partly a story of origins, of Irish immigration and
growing up “in forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester” with its “derelict
shoulder-to-shoulder houses” (3). Working-class life in the 1960s is very
limited: “no one we know is on the electoral roll and a journey by car is as
unusual as space travel” (4). Hyperbole, a staple of Morrissey’s style, makes
the point: