Funnier than its reputation, and longer.

Nobody warns you that it's funny. The reputation is wet Limerick, dead babies, a father drinking the dole money — and all of that is in there, but the register is comic. A boy narrates catastrophe in the present tense with no adult standing behind him to explain what any of it means.

The present tense is the reason it works and it's also why it had worn me down by the end. There is no perspective in it, deliberately, and eventually I wanted somebody to step back for a page and think.

I read my mother's copy, which has her name in the front and a bus ticket from 1998 tucked in at the chapter where the twins die. That did more to me than anything on the page.

Worth remembering what this book did to publishing. It won the Pulitzer, sold in numbers memoirs had not previously sold in, and produced fifteen years of misery memoirs with one-word titles and a black-and-white photograph of a sad child on the front. Most of them were dreadful. Not his fault. The two sequels, though, were entirely his fault.

Limerick itself was not delighted, and having read some of the local reaction from the time I have a bit of sympathy with it. He's a comic writer and comic writers exaggerate. Seven.