Toy Fights: A Boyhood - 'A classic of its kind' William Boyd

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Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson – The Irish Times

However even during the poverty and mentally ill episodes , he writes so precisely, affectionately, scabrously, funnily. Travis Barker LEAKS name of the son he is expecting with wife Kourtney Kardashian... and reveals the due date too (it's sooner than you think) Intentionally or not - it’s also well-timed - Scottish literature at the mo - and realistically for quite a while now - is practically defined by a particular type of story: 70s, council estate, escape, return - whether fiction (Shuggie Bain for instance being a work of fiction marketed as essentially a memoir - which is ethically preferable to the reverse if nothing else), essay (Andrew O’Hagan: LRB), and autobiography (many). Heidi Klum tantalisingly reveals just PART of her Halloween look after weeks of speculation... so what WILL the queen of the costumes dress as?Paterson has the obsessive’s geeky enthusiasm for whatever he is detailing, be it the Osmonds’s Crazy Horses achieving a particular synth effect (“a Yamaha YC-30 with a ribbon control, yes I know you don’t care”) or the beauty of an Akira Yoshizawa origami fold. This tends to entertain, though it can also alienate. But then a reader could likely enjoy Toy Fights for its author’s facility with simile alone. An early musical inspiration “looked disconcertingly like a reflection of Rolf Harris’s actual soul”, while “the David Brent of jazz” plays like “ Mr Bean practising air piano”. Could this vegan collagen supplement be the secret to your best skin ever? These real women are loving the results - so could it work for you?

Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by Don Paterson Book review: Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by Don Paterson

You write: “My state in repose is bored, slightly afraid, agitated, and for some reason really dehydrated.” What’s with the dehydration? Don Paterson was born in Scotland in 1963, this book talks about his boyhood and the struggles he had to become the poet, writer, and musician he is now. My only reservation here is that, for such a clever and insightful person, he fails to make a real connection, unless I missed it, between the stupefying amounts of dope he was consuming as an adolescent and his bout of schizophrenia. Heaven knows if there is one, but it can’t stretch the bounds of probability too much. Did that free things up for him? “I could see things a lot more clearly. It’s the gift of perspective you get from someone close to you dying, and you get to remember them correctly.” In the book, Paterson has only praise for his father, who was determined to be different from his own father, “a gruff, rough man of few words”. Paterson’s father, by contrast, was a sensitive type and a reader. Is Paterson like his dad, I wonder?The most harrowing section of the book is an account of Paterson’s descent into madness. He sets off one day to buy some hash, of which he is by now consuming an epic amount, from one of the many doss houses around which his and his friends’ social life revolved.