Reading Matters

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.

'A Drinking Life' by Pete Hamill

Non-fiction - paperback; 1st Back Bay Ed; 280 pages; 1995.

I am a sucker for memoirs, especially if they're written by "proper writers", whether authors or journalists. It's not so much that these particular people lead more interesting lives than others, but they can write about them so much better than anyone else. Essentially, they use the skills of novelists and reporters to turn their life stories into highly readable and entertaining narratives.

I was particularly keen to read journalist and novelist Pete Hamill's memoir A Drinking Life because I knew so little about the man. I suspect Americans have a better handle on him given he's been the editor-in-chief of both the New York Post and the New York Daily News, but I only discovered him when I read his 2002 novel Forever last year. I thought that book was excellent and on an excursion to New York last November I went on a mission to track down his memoir, expecting that I'd probably have to order it online at some point. But, alas, the first store I went into -- Barnes & Noble in the Time Warner Centre -- had it in stock. I felt like I'd found gold at the end of the rainbow!

Needless to say, it took me almost a year to dig it out of the ever-growing To Be Read pile, but the wait was worth it.

Given the title I had expected A Drinking Life to be a story about Hamill's battle with booze, but that's not really what this memoir is about. While he discusses his relationship with alcohol very frankly throughout the book, from his first taste of beer as a child to his teenage discovery that drink could let him "get rid of something", this is not solely an alcoholic's confessional. It's actually a memoir of a lifetime New Yorker, and, more crucially, reveals how a poor working-class kid from Brooklyn managed to carve out a successful writing career despite several setbacks, poor decisions and a fondness for women and drink.

At times it reminded me very much of Betty Smith's much-loved American classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, particularly Hamill's account of growing up in Brooklyn the oldest of seven children (his parents were Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland), but it's also a firsthand account of what it was like to experience everything from the Great Depression (Hamill was born in 1935) to the Korean War, McCarthyism to the assassination of President Kennedy.

What makes this particular memoir so vivid and interesting to read, however, is Hamill's brutal frankness and the candid nature of his writing. He never shies away from being totally honest, even if it portrays him in a bad light. His relationship with his father is often painful to read, because he makes it clear that he loved his father, a one-legged drunk, but did not feel that his father loved him in return -- he was constantly seeking approval that never came. It was only when he left school at 16, moved out of the family home and took a job as sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that he gained some measure of paternal respect. This was helped, in part, by working alongside men that knew his father and who told him tales about Billy Hamill's strength, determination and brains.

Pity allowed me to see him as man, instead of a father who could not play the role that my childish imagination and need had assigned him. I could see him in Belfast as a boy, running streets and fields with his twin brother, trying to eat in a kitchen with a dozen other kids, listening to commands from his own father. [...] In a new way Billy Hamill came alive to me, a person cobbled together from sparse facts and my imagination, and in that summer of my own defeat, I pitied him, with the glibness of a child, and felt the permanent grieving hurt in all his black silences.

But despite Hamill's vow that "I didn't want to be like my father. I didn't want to be a drunk", he discovers that drinking gives him "strength, confidence, ease, laughter; it made me believe that dreams really could come true". It is the drink that sustains him through a myriad number of changes in life direction: he studies art, has an affair with a much older nude model while dating a "nice girl" his own age, flees to Mexico City with a male friend to study painting and writing, and later returns to New York, as a fugitive, to work as a graphic designer. In 1960 he makes the dramatic switch from pictures to words, and becomes a reporter for the New York Post.

He later marries, has two children, and travels the world in pursuit of stories and good times. When his marriage breaks down, mainly because of his drinking, he decides to quit the bottle for good. It was a move that produced another dramatic turn in his life, because he met and later moved in with actress Shirley MacLaine, and developed a career writing fiction, including novels and TV scripts.

According to Hamill's own website, A Drinking Life was on the New York Times list for 13 weeks when it was published in 1995. I'm not surprised. It's a terrific account of a life well-lived, even if much of that life was marred by drink. You certainly don't need to have read any of his novels to appreciate the wonderful story recounted here, but it will no doubt encourage you to seek out his other work. It's emotional, forthright, funny and informative: what more could you ask for in a memoir?

'The Life of Hunger' by Amélie Nothomb

Fiction/memoir - hardcover; Faber and Faber; 160 pages; 2006. Translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside.

When I read Amélie Nothomb's astonishingly profound Sulphuric Acid last September I was intrigued enough to seek out more work by this Belgian author. I managed to track down a slightly battered second-hand copy of The Life of Hunger and mistakenly thought it would be a straightforward account of the author's battle with anorexia (well, with a title like that you would, wouldn't you?). Instead it's a kind of weird hybrid between memoir and fiction (or, as the Faber & Faber website describes it, an "odd memoir-cum-novel") in which Nothomb tells her life story from the age of four to 21.

This isn't as boring as one might expect, because Nothomb lead a fascinating childhood. Her father was a Belgian diplomat, so she got to live in various exotic places around the world. Indeed, she was born in Kobe, Japan, and then went on to live in China, New York, Bangladesh and Laos.

But the one constant in her life -- aside from her elder sister to whom she feels especially close -- is her hunger which is at odds with her personal affluence:

As far back as my memories go, I have always been dying of hunger. [...] I might add that my hunger should be understood in the broadest sense of the word: had it only been hunger for food, it might not have been so serious. But is it possible only to be hungry for food? Is there a hunger of the belly that is not also a sign of a generalised hunger? By hunger, I mean that terrible lack within the whole being, the gnawing void, the aspiration not so much to a utopian plentitude as to simple reality: where there is nothing, I beg for there to be something.

Reading between the lines I suspect that Nothomb's fierce intelligence lead her to feel, think and experience things more deeply that other people. Indeed, by the time she's a teenager her hunger manifests itself in anorexia, which she welcomes because it "kept me in an ice age in which feelings ceased to grow." She adds: "It was a respite: I stopped hating myself."

(In quite a revealing article in The Independent, published in 2006, she's quoted as saying "I'm totally cured. I eat in a strange way, but I enjoy it. Everything became well when I finally understood that I enjoy being hungry. Normally, I only eat in the evening. It's wonderful. It's like an orgy!")

Unfortunately, any deeper exploration of the disease is absent, as Nothomb skips over her two-and-a-half year battle in just a handful of pages. In fact, much of the book is like this. An incident in the sea when she lived in Bangladesh seems so fleeting, so superficial, I'm not sure what to make of it: was she molested by four men, or was she not?

This floating, dream-like quality to the writing is a double-edged sword: beautiful to read but too vague to interpret factually.

There's also a slightly precocious tone to the writing, and I can imagine that probably reflects what Nothomb was like as a child. (There are, in fact, several references to her early intelligence in the book. But the one that stands out most is a teacher at the French Lycee in New York calling Nothomb's mother to say "Your daughter's brain is overdeveloped. Do you think she suffers?")

On the whole, this is a quirky, somewhat off-beat memoir, one that might mean more to those who have read all of Amélie Nothomb's back catalogue, rather than the single volume I have managed to enjoy. I guess that means I just need to read more of her work... and with at least 10 translated into English I won't be short of choices.

'Petite Anglaise' by Catherine Sanderson

Non-fiction - hardcover; Penguin; 340 pages; 2008.

Petite Anglaise is one of those books that first started life as a blog -- the refreshingly well written and entertaining Petite Anglaise -- except this is not a collection of posts strung together to form a disjointed narrative. Instead it's a proper memoir that charts Catherine Sanderson's life in Paris as an expat Brit.

Despite its (not particularly attractive) chick-lit cover, the story deals with some fairly weighty subject matter, not the least Catherine's decision to leave her long-term partner (dubbed Mr Frog) and the father of her child (dubbed Tadpole), because she'd embarked on an affair with someone who left comments on her blog! Saucy, no?

But the book also charts a love affair with Paris, a city that Catherine became obsessed about when she was an 11-year-old school girl in Yorkshire.

France. Here was a destination to bend my running steps towards; a hook to hang my daydreams on; so alluring, so exotic, so tantalizingly close. No matter that school French lessons consisted of little more than endlessly rehearsed role plays and verb conjugations. No matter that my first extended stay on French soil would not take place for another six agonizing years. As I sat in a numbered booth in the school language lab, cumbersome headphones blocking out the English sounds of the world around me, I closed my eyes and pretended I was actually there. I yearned to taste the 200 grams of pâté I was instructed to buy in the grocer's shop; to visit the church or the town hall after quizzing a passer-by -- invariably an elderly man wearing a beret -- for directions. 'Ecoutez, puis répétz!' said the voice on the crackling tape at the start of every exercise. 'Listen, then dream' would have been more apt. I'd fallen hopelessly, irrationally, in love with the French language and, by extension, with France. And I'm at a loss to explain why, even now.

After a stint as an exchange student and later as an English assistante at a lycee in Normandy -- where she acquires her first French boyfriend -- it seems Catherine's path is set. A teaching job at the Sorbonne Nouvelle follows and before long Catherine is living in the City of Light, where she meets Mr Frog and settles down with him. But seven years later, with a one-year-old child, the dream is fading: Mr Frog works long hours and Catherine, a secretary for an English company, is bored at work and stressed at home.

She starts a blog -- "a harmless hobby...my virtual playground" -- to capture some "arch observations about life in Paris". But when her posts become more personal -- confessing that her partner does not want to marry her, for instance -- her online popularity grows substantially and she gains a worldwide audience.

Little did I know I had just unleashed a force which, within less than a year, would turn my life, and the lives of those dearest to me, inside out.

As much as I enjoyed this book -- I raced through it in the space of a cold, wet weekend, unable to tear my eyes away from it -- I have to admit that I'm in two minds about the author. I'm not sure if she's so shallow that she'll resort to almost anything for publicity (anonymous or not), or if she is someone to admire because she was focused and determined enough to chase a dream. But what I do know is  this: she is a superb writer. Her effortless prose style is by turns witty and heartbreakingly sad. She's painfully honest throughout, baring herself open in such a way that you feel voyeuristic reading her thoughts. The narrative trots along at a fair old pace and there's enough "hooks" to keep you reading on to see what might happen next.

Interestingly enough, after Catherine finished this book and before it was published, she was fired by the accountancy firm where she worked for blogging about life in the office. She went on to win her case, and has now embarked on a writing career. Her first novel is due for publication next year.

'Giving up the Ghost' by Hilary Mantel

Nonfiction - paperback; HarperPerennial; 252 pages; 2004.

Hilary Mantel is an award-winning British author of whom I only have a passing acquaintance. I read her last novel, Beyond Black, in early 2006 and very much enjoyed its dark inventiveness, especially her quirky characters and the descriptions of a rather dull and dreary suburban England populated by ghosts.

Giving up the Ghost is her much-lauded memoir, released in 2004 to critical acclaim, and how, having read it, I can see many aspects of her character in Beyond Black's narrator, Alison Hart, an overweight psychic. Mantel never goes into specifics, but it's clear that she has some psychic tendencies, too. On the first page of her memoir she claims to have seen her step-father's ghost. "I am not perturbed," she writes. "I am used to 'seeing' things that aren't there."

The book is peppered with other unusual claims, including her sighting of an undefined "creature" in the back garden when she was seven that "has wrapped a strangling hand around my life, and I don't know how, or what it was".

There are large gaps in her life's account, and the narrative, while largely chronological, does jump around a bit. "But in this book I didn't aim to tell the story of my life," she writes in the afterword, "just the story of two aspects of it, my childhood and my own childlessness. It was never meant to be the whole story. Stories are never whole."

This is a good summation of Giving up the Ghost, which can, effectively, be broken into two halves: the first tells of her childhood growing up in a working-class Catholic family in the grim suburb of Hadfield in Manchester in the 1950s; the second of her rather traumatic adulthood filled with a string of misdiagnosed illnesses which render her unable to have children.

By turns the book is funny and sad; it's often witty but never mawkish; and I came away from it feeling that Mantel had lead a very tough but somehow inspirational life. From the outset Mantel's childhood was riddled with family secrets -- her father disappeared; her mother moved her lover into the house and then moved suburbs to avoid a community scandal -- that caused her to live in an "emotional labyrinth". Even when she escaped the family home and moved to London to begin her university law course, the dark ghosts of the past would not let her go...

By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander around my body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time I tried to put my finger on it.

Written in a clear-eyed prose style, it is, at times, so honest as to be painful. Mantel, herself, admits that she struggles to write much of it. "Once you have learned the habits of secrecy, they aren't so easy to give up," she confesses mid-way through the book.

She is particularly frank about her various illnesses, which lead to her stacking on the weight and "accumulating an anger that would rip a roof off". And the ways in which she comes to terms with her infertility is also painfully candid, the hurt seemingly oozing off the page.

This is not a particularly cheerful read, but it is an inspirational one about chasing dreams, seeking answers and forging your own path in life. I loved it and now that I know more about Hilary Mantel's life I hope to read more of her fiction very soon.

'Thirteen Tonne Theory: Life Inside Hunters and Collectors' by Mark Seymour

Non-fiction - paperback; Viking; 391 pages; 2008.

If you are an Australian of a certain age and are a fan of pub rock, then chances are you have seen Hunters and Collectors perform live. And if you have seen them perform live then you no doubt know that this band is one of the most visceral live acts -- second only to Midnight Oil -- to ever come out of the Southern Hemisphere.

This book, written by lead singer Mark Seymour (who also happens to be the older brother of Crowded House's bass player Nick Seymour), provides an inside look at what it was like fronting this powerhouse of a band for 18 years.

Of course, if you haven't already guessed by now, I am a longtime Hunters and Collectors fan. But funnily enough, I always preferred seeing them live than listening to their records, which never seemed to convey the sheer velocity and passion of the music when performed in concert. In fact, this view of the band is not a unique one: they were critically acclaimed but never quite achieved the commercial success that comes so easily to other bands that do far less hard graft.

The book, which is currently only available in Australia (my sister gave me this copy when she visited me in London a couple of months ago), does help explain why the band was big in Australia but failed to crack the UK or American markets. Set up as an artistic collective, in which every member of the eight-piece band shared songwriting copyright and royalties, the decision-making process did not allow anyone to take the lead, nor did it allow the goal of commercial superstardom to become the over-riding aim. Seymour makes no bones about how frustrating this became, especially when, as lead singer, he was seen as the "face" of the band and its key lyricist.

At times the story reads a bit like a kid who has thrown the toys out of the pram. Seymour clearly thinks the band and, more importantly, himself deserved better. But he is also incredibly candid and so hard on himself that you kind of feel sorry for him.

I particularly liked his account of the band's early days in London, where they were on the cusp of international success, only to blow it all when one member who'd had too much to drink insulted the record company. This incident -- in a curry house in Shepherd's Bush -- would be laugh-out-loud funny if it weren't for the painful financial repercussions that followed. You get the sense that Hunters and Collectors never quite recovered from this monumental error.

All in all, Thirteen Tonne Theory (the name comes from the weight of equipment the band took on the road when they toured up and down the country) is an intriguing read. Written by a singer that crafted so many Australian anthems -- Talking to a Stranger, Say Goodbye, Throw Your Arms Around Me and The Holy Grail -- it's a wonderful, if slightly worthy, warts-and-all account that fans will find fascinating.

'Things the Grandchildren Should Know' by Mark Oliver Everett

Non-fiction - hardcover; Little Brown; 256 pages; 2008.

To survive the tragic deaths of your entire family is one thing, to become a critically acclaimed musician is another, and yet  44-year-old Mark Oliver Everett has done both. Now, with the release of this memoir, he can also added talented author to the list.

Everett, better known as 'E' from the Eels, an alternative rock band which is essentially Everett and an ever-changing cast of musicians, seems to be the current flavour of the month here in the UK. He recently starred in a BBC 4 documentary called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives about his father, the late quantum physicist Hugh Everett III, who was the originator of the many-worlds theory. Then his book was published and just last week he played a special gig at St James's Church in Piccadilly to promote it.

The beauty of Things the Grandchildren Should Know is its easy-to-read narrative style and Everett's tongue-in-cheek self-deprecating humour. This is surprising given the largely sad story contained within its pages. Not only does Everett lose a succession of family members under various tragic circumstances -- his father of a heart attack aged just 51, his mother of lung cancer, his drug-addicted older sister of suicide and his air stewardess cousin in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11 -- but many of his friends and colleagues in the music business have also died before their time.

Understandably Everett wrestles with many demons, including depression, but he never loses sight of his goal, which is to make the best music he can make without sacrificing his integrity. Getting the first record deal was tough. Keeping the record company happy was even tougher.

What you gather from reading this book is that Everett has a wonderful ability to roll with the punches. Ever pragmatic, he states that it is only by experiencing terrible lows that he can appreciate the highs, such as his critically acclaimed success. "I can get overwhelmed with situations sometimes," he writes towards the end of the book. "But it's not as bad or as often as it used to be, and I think living through so much crazy shit really has made me stronger. Just like they say it should."

Things the Grandchildren Should Know is the kind of thought-provoking memoir that makes you thankful for the good things in life -- and you don't necessarily have to know anything about Mark Oliver Everett or be a fan of the Eels to appreciate its universal message.

'The Amazing Adventures of Diet Girl' by Shauna Reid

Non-fiction - paperback; Corgi; 400 pages; 2008.

"I've got the biggest knickers in Australia."

So begins Shauna Reid's refreshingly candid, often humorous and hugely inspirational The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl, which charts her seven-year battle with the bulge.

Shauna's story, which first appeared in blog form, is an entertaining read reminiscent of Bridget Jones Diary. It is not a typical diet book. There are no recipes, no quick-and-easy solutions to fighting the flab. Instead it's an enthralling novel-like narrative that follows Shauna's ups and downs as she struggles to lose 12-and-a-half stone.

She battles depression, curbs her secret food binges and learns to love the gym. Along the way she finds the courage to backpack to the other side of the world and nabs herself a Scottish husband in the process.

I loved this book and kept turning the pages well into the early hours of the morning. It's enormously moving in places, but any sense of self-pity is tempered by a self-deprecating sense of humour which had me laughing out loud more than once.

The beauty of this book is that it shows how it is possible to achieve anything if you set your mind to it.  Shauna's steely determination to succeed and years of hard work paid off handsomely in the end. For that reason alone The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl should be required reading for anyone wanting to change any aspect of their life who lacks the courage to do so. It's already made me want to cut my caffeine intake and ride my bicycle more often!

'Autobiography of a Geisha' by Sayo Masuda

Non-fiction - paperback; Vintage East; 224 pages; 2006. Translated from the Japanese by G. G. Rowley.

This remarkable autobiography written by 32-year-old Sayo Masuda and first published in 1957 documents her struggle to seek out an ordinary life.

As a six-year-old, Sayo's mother sent her to work as a nursemaid for some wealthy landowners who tied her up if she misbehaved, forced her to sleep on a "hempen sack stuffed with rags thrown into the corner of the storehouse" and only allowed her to eat scraps that they left under the kitchen sink.

Unable to go to school, unable to read, I had grown up as an abandoned dog does; and then, at the age of 12, I was sold. Actually, I didn't know how old I was; but around that time I heard someone saying that the child was twelve, and I recall thinking "So I'm twelve years old then, am I?" Given that, it must have been about 1936 or 1937.

The place I was sold to was a geisha house in Upper Suwa called the Takenoya. At first I was wide-eyed with astonishment at its splendor, like a palace in a dream. [...] But the rigors that began the following day taught me that this was not the soft life I thought it would be, that this was no haven or refuge.

For the next four years Sayo was at the beck and call of the geisha house "sisters", running errands and doing housework. She also went to geisha school, learning shamisen (a three-stringed instrument played with a plectrum), drum and dancing, the arts that distinguish geishas from the popular Western misconception that they are simply prostitutes.

But Sayo's geisha house, slap bang in the middle of a rural hot-springs resort, did not comply with the normal geisha traditions: sex was part of the equation, although Sayo only ever hints at this by describing herself as a "body for sale" and indicating that her role is to "make everyone, everywhere in your presence, feel that you're sexy".

Making her debut as a professional geisha at age sixteen, Sayo took a danna, or patron, a wealthy man called "Cockeye" who would financially support her. Going by the following description, she did not think much of him:

His eyes were squinty, he was going bald, and his face glowed bright red; when he sat drinking in his quilted cotton jacket, dripping with sweat and leering with satisfaction, he looked just like an octopus. And what was really creepy was that you could never tell where he was looking.

Despite Sayo's material comforts, her life over the next decade or so is far from secure. Among other dramas, she falls in love with a man she cannot have, tries to commit suicide and takes care of her long lost younger brother. But despite the enormous ups and downs of her traumatic, trying life, Sayo radiates an unexpected optimism that things will get better, that she will escape the trappings of her geisha life and find a more respectable way to make a living.

This is a sad but inspirational tale about one woman's struggle for survival -- and redemption -- written in a straightforward, narrative style, sometimes infused with unexpected humour. It's by no means a perfect book but it's a remarkable one given that the author was illiterate for much of her life.

Finally, this edition by Vintage features a wonderful introduction by the translator. This is complimented by a charming epilogue in which she gets to meet the elderly Sayo Masuda, who breaks her silence for the first time since initial publication -- this is worth the cover price alone.

'Memoir' by John McGahern

Nonfiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2005.

I read this beautiful, lyrical and tear-inducing autobiography in just two sittings. With no chapters or natural breaks, I just could not tear my eyes away from McGahern's seamless narrative.

Concentrating mainly on his childhood and adolescence growing up in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s, it is very much a love letter to his adored mother, an accomplished school teacher, who died of breast cancer when he was eight years old.

It is also a heartfelt exploration of the ambiguous and complicated relationship with his father, a police sergeant, who ruled the family -- McGahern, the eldest child, had six younger siblings -- with a vicious tongue, temperamental mood swings and powerful fists.

At times the grief resonates off the page -- the account of his mother's illness, in which the family was moved out, furniture and all, to the police barracks in a different village while she lay upstairs in her sickbed seemed unbelievably cruel. During the several weeks in which she lay in her sickbed dying, her husband -- McGahern's father -- did not once visit her to offer comfort or companionship. This is something that stays with McGahern for the rest of his life: his inability to understand his father's lack of care or consideration for others close to him.

Despite this, Memoir is not a soppy book. And by no means is it anywhere near as cloying as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (which, by the way, I loved when I read it several years ago). The difference here is that McGahern is not seeking sympathy, but recounting honestly and truthfully what it was like to grow up with a widower father, who could not relate to those he supposedly loved and found it easier to lash out than bite his tongue. In many ways the book is about McGahern coming to terms with the fact that he will never understand his father.

What I found most interesting is how McGahern mined the events of his life for his fiction. I can't tell you how many times I felt the penny dropping as I read specific incidences: just the mere fact that his beloved mother had died of breast cancer explained much about the clear-eyed realistic portrayal of a woman grappling with illness in his debut novel The Barracks.

There are other bits -- the unspecified sexual abuse as he shares his father's bed, the desire to enter the priesthood and the rescue of his sister from a boss who molests her -- that appear in his second novel, The Dark. Similarly, his father's remarriage to a younger woman, the strength of his love for his sisters and the continual running away of his youngest brother, feature in his Booker shortlisted book Amongst Women.

I also found it interesting to read about McGahern's life as a writer: how he first discovered literature (a local priest had a wonderful library he was allowed to riffle); when he first realised he wanted to be a writer and not a priest or a farmer, two options that had been open to him; and how he dealt with the ups and downs of his career (lauded by the literary elite, banned by the Irish censors).

All in all, fans of McGahern's fiction will find much to admire in this wise and compelling book, but even if you have not read any of his novels or short stories this is a must read memoir that will have you rushing to read everything he has ever written.

'The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade' by Piers Morgan

Non fiction - paperback; Ebury Press; 484 pages; 2005.

I confess that I have never been much of a Piers Morgan fan, after all he's a (former) tabloid editor and I don't have that much respect for tabloid newspapers. But now that I've read Morgan's memoirs, which chart his meteoric rise from showbiz reporter to editor of a national newspaper, the Rupert Murdoch-owned News of the World, at the tender age of 28, I have a new-found respect for the man. 

Despite the obvious arrogance and his tendency towards egomania, he is a formidable and hugely talented editor who has similar editorial values as my own, something I would never have realised without reading this book. (I also admire his fierce anti-war stance.) I came away from The Insider full of admiration (his ingenious ideas for front covers, particularly on The Mirror, astound me with their brilliance) and appreciation.

Written in diary form, this difficult-to-put-down book, covers all the major events of the past decade, including Tony Blair becoming Prime Minister, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the terrorist attack on New York's Twin Towers and the outbreak of war in Iraq. Similarly, it is filled with massive personalities from George Michael to Victoria Beckham, Paula Yates to Paul McCartney - and (rather indiscreetly) reveals tidbits of their lives you would never read about anywhere else.

More importantly, this book gives an intriguing glimpse into how the Fourth Estate operates, and often co-operates, with Government, Royalty and Celebrity. The power games and tawdry struggles will have you gasping with shock one minute, killing yourself laughing the next.

And it also demonstrates how newspaper staff often pull out all the stops to deliver the big news stories of the day while us mere mortals lead a dull nine-to-five existence. Mind you, Morgan pulls no punches in describing not only the adrenalin rush of his job, but the fierce (and sometimes violent) rivalry between other editors and newspapers in the fight to stay on top in such a cutthroat business.

While The Insider has a particularly British slant, it's a brilliant, fast-paced and entertaining read no matter where you come from. Shocking, scandalous and utterly compulsive, I loved this book. If you are interested in pop culture and/or the media you would be well advised to get your hands on a copy as soon as you possibly can - you won't be disappointed.

'I was Bono's Doppelganger' by Neil McCormick

Non fiction - paperback; Penguin; 240 pages; 2005.

This book is about one man's struggle to achieve his ambition of being a rock star. The only problem was his school friend, Paul Hewson, beat him to it. Paul Hewson, is, of course, Bono of U2 fame.

McCormick takes the reader on a wild ride from his Dublin school days in the 1970s at probably the most famous primary school in the world, Mount Temple, to the dizzy heights as a music journalist for London's daily broadsheet The Daily Telegraph in the late 1990s. But being a successful writer wasn't what McCormick had planned. He wanted to be famous for a completely different reason: pop music.

The book charts his attempts to make it in the music industry, falling (depressingly and frustratingly) at almost every turn, while Bono and the lads, otherwise known as U2, take the world by storm, performing record-breaking stadium concerts, selling millions of albums and becoming the most famous people on the planet. U2's meteoric rise only seems to put McCormick's so-called failures into deeper shadow.

As much as loved reading this hilarious and heartbreaking story, most of the time I wished I could shake McCormick by the scruff of the neck and shout WAKE UP, IT AIN'T EVER GONNA HAPPEN!  If nothing else, this book is testament to perseverance, of never giving up, of striving and striving against all odds to live a dream.

Unsurprisingly, the writing is candid to the point of being embarrassing. Pain, frustration and repressed anger resonate off the page. McCormick's envy and resentment of U2's success is palpable. "You're living my life!" he once raged at Bono.

But the overall tone of the book is balanced nicely by the use of wince-inducing one-liners, funny anecdotes and layer upon layer of self-deprecating humour. Without this, I was Bono's Doppelganger may have come off as sounding like a jealous rant.

Instead it paints an engaging portrait of Bono as a genuinely good-hearted man, not the egotistical preacher-like celebrity he sometimes comes across as (I'm allowed to say that because, just in case you didn't know, I'm a bit of a U2 fan). Alas, the only ego in this book is McCormick's and even then you can't help but be charmed by him as well.

Overall, this is a brilliant, funny, honest and ironic book. I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

'Lucky' by Alice Sebold

Non-Fiction - paperback; Picador; 272 pages; 2003.

This is a searing and incredibly moving account of Sebold's rape as an 18-year-old college freshman in 1981. Brutally honest from cover to cover, Sebold does not pull any punches, whether describing her emotionally cold upbringing, the rape itself or the friends won and lost during the psychological fallout following the tragedy.              
             
I found this a gripping true-life story, so gripping that I read it in one sitting. Sebold's bravery, not just in surviving the rape and helping to secure the conviction of her attacker, but in putting her experience down on paper to share with complete strangers, is incredibly inspiring. This is a heart-wrenching, disturbing and — surprisingly — witty book that will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.
             
And for those who have read Sebold's The Lovely Bones, it is an interesting insight into that novel's exploration of how a brutal crime can impact on an entire family.

'The Shark Net' by Robert Drewe

Non-Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 358 pages; 2000.

Robert Drewe is one of Australia's most critically acclaimed writers. In this book he switches his focus from fiction to memoir, with mixed results.

Born in Melbourne, Drewe moved to Perth with his family when he was a young boy. In the most isolated city on earth, he lived a comfortable and carefree middle-class existence by the beach. But then a man Drewe knew murdered a boy he also knew. Before long, a murderer was on the rampage, randomly killing eight strangers. Suddenly life took on a darker twist.

At the same time that Perth was losing its innocence, so, too, was Drewe, who became a teenage father and husband, something his upstanding parents found difficult to deal with.

While I had expected the book to concentrate on Perth's dark underbelly and Drewe's reaction to the crimes happening around him, what I got was a rather uninspiring account of an ordinary suburban childhood. While I found the descriptions of Perth intriguing and could feel Drewe's love of its amazing coastline and the friendliness of the people permeate off the pages, I found the lack of dates annoying (was it the fifties or the sixties?) and some of his writing pedestrian. However, his insights into life as a young cadet reporter were interesting; if only breaking into journalism and then getting a job on Melbourne's Age was as easy now as it was then!

All in all, this is an entertaining account of an Australian childhood in a bygone, if somewhat unspecified, era.