Candid and frequently affecting ... Not a catalog of constant woes. Mr. Kureishi blends in thoughts and meditations on a variety of topics ... As with the best of his fiction, Mr. Kureishi suffuses his memoir with humor.
The entries are astute, nostalgic, gentle, angry, grateful, even angrier, even more grateful, scatological, always emotional, always biting ... The burning immediacy of each entry is unmistakable ... Kureishi’s style, his obsessions, his language—they’re all here in this extraordinary work ... The book cannot help making you ask: What will happen next? ... All of this Kureishi portrays with offhand precision and humor ... The sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it is also one of the characteristics Kureishi reveals about himself that makes him so likable here, and the writing so intimate. The tone is remarkable: even the self-pity has no self-pity ... Full of humor but also driven by a distinctive sympathy and a very precise and intricate propriety.
His memoir is good but modestly so. It contains a great deal of black comedy but its most impressive emotion is regret — for things undone and unsaid earlier in his life ... Remorse runs through this memoir’s veins like tracer dye. Kureishi stares hard at himself ... We confront the bare wood beneath the bark of Kureishi’s best earlier writing. But he is good and bracing company on the page. His book is never boring. He offers frank lessons in resilience, about blowing the sparks that are still visible, about ringing the bells that still can ring.
