Publishers Weekly
05/29/2023
Poet and jazz guitarist Paterson (The Arctic) chronicles in this exuberant memoir his working-class childhood in Dundee, Scotland, up through his departure for London at the age of 20 in 1984. Socially awkward and intellectually curious, Paterson immersed himself in such unlikely pursuits as creating pornographic origami at age 10 and joining a Pentecostal sect as a teen before he settled on the guitar—which he’d played on and off his whole life—as his primary obsession. Elsewhere, Paterson describes his psychotic break after ingesting heroin-laced hashish as a teenager, which caused him to hear voices in his head and become convinced that his parents were poisoning him. Paterson’s musings are shot through with sharp wit, especially when he’s taking aim at hypocrites in the arts and in his life—at one point, he writes that narcissists “usually consist of a paper-thin, wildly overconfident act disguising a crust of fear, over a mantle of shame, wrapped round a core of nothing.” Most enchanting are Paterson’s musings on music, from hilarious reminiscences of the Dundee folk scene (“ome hippy dressed as a returning trawlerman in a sou’wester... sang forty verses about the 1894 Whelk Pickers’ Strike in Buckie”) to gorgeous homages to obscure performers: “The note starts off straight and pure, then suddenly yields to some hidden ache it finds in itself,” he writes about a performance by Norwegian singer Radka Toneff. The result is a raucously funny picaresque laced with hard-earned wisdom. (July)
The Atlantic - James Parker
"The prose is fizzing-brained, hyperbolic, and it has a hyperbolic effect: It makes you want to delete everything you’ve ever written and start again, this time telling the truth."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-05-02
The acclaimed Scottish poet chronicles the misadventures of his youth.
In this witty memoir, Paterson (b. 1963), the only two-time winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, revisits his origins in the working-class community of Dundee. Though the author is a celebrated poet, this book contains few references to the writing process. Music is the guiding thread (Paterson is also a jazz musician), and he explores how it pulled him out of his small town, where “for every family on the street, debt was a constant low drone.” As he charts a path through the 1970s and ’80s, he deftly avoids the twin pitfalls of romanticism and nostalgia, instead describing the poverty, violence, and customs of his youth with evenhanded observation and often humor. The titular “toy fight” refers to a childhood game that “was basically twenty minutes of extreme violence without pretext,” violence being as typical to his boyhood as sugar, which included both special treats and “staple forms of sugar, the ones you’d obviously die without.” Childhood led into adolescence through a series of painful school years and obsessive hobbies ranging from origami to guitar. Eventually, Paterson suffered an “acute adolescent schizophrenic episode,” about which he writes candidly. While recovering, his love of music allowed him to chart a future while providing stability and joy. This part of the memoir is the most listlike, deviating into a who’s who of the Scottish music scene, though what the book lacks in narrative connective tissue it compensates for in the plentiful obscenities and vivid descriptions that provide ample entertainment. Punctuating the primary text with frequent and often volatile footnotes, Paterson interrupts his story with rages against a variety of issues, including the “sentimental, fake-aspirational, poverty-celebrating muddle that results when middle-class white folks write black songs.” This memoir is gritty, direct, and alternately doggedly sincere and uproariously hilarious.
A uniquely compelling, expressive memoir packed with explosive asides and raucous insight.
