PanThe Washington PostSo much of the writing in this book is awkward and flat that I was briefly tempted to blame translator Frank Wynne for its infelicities, but a glance at the original Spanish text reveals that Wynne has crafted a workmanlike but accurate representation of Almodóvar’s prose ... The Pedro Almodóvar who emerges from these black-and-white pages is a mediocre writer. It is the heightened colors of the movie screen that reveal his undisputed genius. My imaginary bookseller should place this volume in the Film section, but no one should seek it out until after they’ve seen all of Almodóvar’s movies.
Jeanette Winterson
RaveSlateWinterson explains the genesis of her fragmentary writing style—which, naturally, lies in her own origins—and the result is just as beautiful, and just as frustrating, as her fiction. At times, she conjures the lost working-class Northern English world she grew up in with such clarity you can see the pattern on the wallpaper, or the bleakness of the coal shed where Winterson was sometimes left to sleep. But when it comes to emotions, Winterson scurries and evades like the mice her adoptive mother used to claim were manifestations of spiritual ectoplasm ... Three-quarters of the way through the book, the action suddenly jumps ahead 25 years to 2007 and to the breakup of a relationship, the death of her adoptive father’s second wife, to Jeanette finding her adoption papers, and eventually descending into madness ... These passages are alarming and shockingly revealing—a woman who has looked after herself so effectively since she was 16 can barely manage the basic tasks of survival—but it’s so raw and undigested, it’s hard to take in and difficult to understand ... Never has anyone so outsized and exceptional struggled through such remembered pain to discover how intensely ordinary she was meant to be.
John Preston
PositiveSlatePreston’s description of the buffoonish, bungled murder attempt and of Thorpe’s Old Bailey 'trial of the century' are well-done. Nevertheless, the book’s final third, in which Scott is further victimized by the legal system, makes for depressing reading. Preston refrains from editorializing, but it’s impossible not to be appalled by the ambient homophobia of the period ... In the midst of this awfulness, Preston’s account of the fight to decriminalize male homosexuality in Britain is especially enjoyable.
