It is rare to read an autobiography which balances acerbic, almost visceral, anger with moments of genuine tenderness and affection ... The tone is cleverly nuanced, with a patina of adult self-awareness over the real, or reconstructed, memories ... What makes this stratospherically better than most childhood memoirs is the searing anger about injustice that burns through the book.
The language crackles ... Much of the memoir is knockabout and great fun. Paterson clearly relishes his day release from the ivory tower. Sometimes perhaps too much ... A different tone kicks in when Paterson gets to the "acute adolescent schizophrenic episode" that saw him hospitalised for four months as a teenager. This is some of the best writing on mental health I have ever read.
Paterson’s prose style is resolutely colloquial ... the effort to describe the music – folk and pop and jazz – that he loved as an adolescent leads him into the book’s most rapt and heartfelt passages.
