Book Group Report – Celebrity Memoirs!

My S**t Life So Far by Frankie Boyle

Frankie BoyleOut of all the celebrity memoirs available out there that we could have picked to read in our Book Group, we ended up with Frankie Boyle’s!

For anyone who hasn’t seen the comedy panel game Mock the Week on BBC2, he’s a foul-mouthed Glaswegian comic who can be relied upon to be cringemakingly funny and offensive to all.  His new sell-out tour which is currently underway around the UK is called ‘I would happily punch every one of you in the face’!

I thought it would be very much a ‘ladlit’ memoir with a bad taste joke on every page, and I actually read all 291 pages looking for them – they were few and far between. Instead, the whole thing was totally b-o-r-i-n-g. Frankly his life hasn’t been interesting enough. The writing was rather repetitive and childish; also without his verbal delivery style, his humour doesn’t really translate to the page so well.

How did it go down with our Book Group?

Well most of us found him to be obsessed with w**nking and not good with women; a young man who (formerly) spent most of his time being wasted on booze or ecstasy.  He seems to hate almost everything except his best mate, his writing partner and Sussex university (although he hated the people who went there).  After that we got sidetracked into talking about taboos in comedy, as one of our group had been at his controversial gig in Reading, (click here to read about it),  but I’m not going to discuss that here.  Due to this, we didn’t really develop the celebrity memoir theme any further.

I do occasionally enjoy reading memoirs of actors, musicians and other living people that I look up to and have had interesting careers, but nothing would induce me to open the covers of the vast majority of those volumes which fill the bestseller charts.   If I’m missing out on anything here, you will let me know won’t you!  (3/10, I borrowed this book)

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