Autobiography Author: Morrissey | Language: English | ISBN:
B00G9IMJ3S | Format: PDF
Autobiography Description
“Practically every paragraph has a line or two that demands to be read aloud to the mirror, tattooed on foreheads, carved on tombstones.” –Rolling Stone“Morrissey is a pop star of unusual writing talent.” –The New York TimesAutobiography covers Morrissey’s life from his birth until the present day.
- File Size: 8967 KB
- Print Length: 465 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0399171541
- Publisher: Putnam Adult (December 3, 2013)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00G9IMJ3S
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #82,590 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
100 pages in and so far it has mostly been pretty harrowing descriptions of the casual brutality of post-war working class life and soul-crushing 'education' in northern England alternating with some of the best writing about what music can do to a human being, MEAN to a human being, ever written.
It has its flaws in that it is clearly penned by a self-taught Irish/northerner from a ravaged, poverty-stricken, red-brick wasteland, and as such has not the slickness and sheen of journalistic prose. A trustworthy editor may have improved a number of passages here and there. He likes alliteration a little too much, which I've never been fond of, & which gives the average sentence a strange sing-song quality and structure all its own. There is no way in hell this book was ghostwritten.
But then this is the books greatest strength, too. As with his passions, his politics, his sexuality, he is not 'this' or 'that', does not belong 'here' or 'there', he exists between the temporary meaning of all those words, all those labels, and it is this place he steadfastly attempts to write from in trying to explain himself and the felt experience of his life. That he achieves at all in this impossible mission would be enough for me to want to recommend the book to everyone I know, but that he makes his stand with such humour, passion and courage makes me want to press it into the hands of anyone with half a heart left to feel.
I thought at first, when I saw that it was going to be put out as a Penguin Classic that this was just another of Morrissey's whimsical appropriations of the things he loves, like getting EMI to reopen the "His Master's Voice" label up again just for him.
I thought quite a bit about what I would say. Critiquing someone's autobiography is critiquing someone's assessment of their own life, and that hardly seems fair. Still, we're being asked to plunk down some cash to read it, so I'll try to be as objective as I can.
This is unusually written in the present tense, and I quickly grew to enjoy it. It made me feel as if I were along for the ride and living the experiences with Morrissey. However, things would often veer off (as life itself tends to do) and conversations or situations would pop up seemingly out of nowhere and I'd be left going backwards in the book to see what I had missed. Still, I enjoyed Morrissey's style.
Without judging the man, let me say this: Readers who say that there wasn't enough content devoted to The Smiths have a valid point. It's not that this period was ignored, and it accounts for around 10 percent of Morrissey's life thus far so Morrissey may have thought it didn't deserve a huge percentage of the book. But, like other fans, I felt that this period didn't deliver as much about his experiences with The Smiths as I would have liked. I recognize that Morrissey has license to choose how to tell his own story, but that was what I was most anticipating and found myself feeling a bit short-changed.
However, a considerable amount of time was spent discussing the lawsuit between Moz and Mike Joyce, which was clearly a painful recollection. I, for one, found it enlightening to hear his side of the story. And this helped me understand why a Smiths reunion will never happen. People may say mean things about Moz because of his unwillingness to reunite, but when seeing his perspective on what happened, I can understand why he feels like he has given them enough.
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