Popular Culture Review
of quick contact in these encounters. Yet these structural choices sometimes
impose limitations. At one point, Morrissey is in Paris for half a page and then
suddenly, without any transition other than a paragraph division with a missing
marked structure may reproduce the confused and jolting rush of celebrity
existence, life as a tour itinerary, but may also disorient the reader. Confetti
is not a sustainable model for extended narrative structure or substantial,
coherent comment on a topic.
lives, celebrity memoirs, usually ghost-written, are mostly tedious and vacuous.
Morrissey’s effort is much better than the ruck of such volumes. In language
that is sometimes vivid, he gives a graphic picture of northern, working-class
life in the 1960s and’70s, the evils of the school system of that time and place,
sense of the arbitrariness of the legal system and the risks that attend success.
On the other hand, one of these risks is self-absorption, perhaps inevitably
this problem. In the last part of the book particularly, a naturally hyperbolic
style combines with a playlist of concerts barely salvaged from tedium by
life, the adolescent politics and the obsession with animal protectionism. And
yet, A. A. Gill’s Hatchet Job of the Year notwithstanding, any text that offers
a phrase such as “forgotten Victorian knife-plunging Manchester” (3) is worth
the effort, maybe even 457 pages of it.
Notes
At the date of completing this essay, 14 May 2014, there were 379 customer
reviews of Autobiography on amazon.co.uk for the paperback edition alone.
No less an academic luminary than Terry Eagleton has written interestingly
about the book in the Guardian’s Review Section, while the same issue lists
Autobiography
copies sold in the UK that week (“Weekly Charts” 21). Published as late in
the year as October, the paperback edition still managed to achieve number
forty-seven in the bestsellers list for 2013, with total sales of 140,729 copies
1
part of the Guardian Review Section’s “Christmas Books: The Best of 2013”
issue (Lynskey 9).
Perhaps the best-known response to the book is A. A. Gill’s review,
originally published in the Sunday Times and winner of The Omnivore’s Hatchet
Job of the Year award, “an annual celebration of unkind book reviewing” (Clark
80