Decade skipping at the end of Autobiography

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I am currently reading Autobiography and nearing the end. What on earth is he doing with timelines...there he is talking about Manchester G-Mex and his 2006 tour, people brushing up on the tunes with copies of You are The Quarry etc, then a page later he begins ...'On December 10th we take over Battersea Power station'. Erm....that was bloody 1997!!!! What on earth is he doing.

I am not surprised learned literary critics are taking offence. I only read about one book a decade and even I am spotting his howlers. If he was this bad at English at school I'm not surprised his teachers gave him such a hard time. Is it just me or does he get his dates in a muddle.

Please please don't mix your decades up. I nearly went to the Battersea gig but like others, I turned back when I realised it was some tech company jolly. Now...what decade are we in...
 
I am currently reading Autobiography and nearing the end. What on earth is he doing with timelines...there he is talking about Manchester G-Mex and his 2006 tour, people brushing up on the tunes with copies of You are The Quarry etc, then a page later he begins ...'On December 10th we take over Battersea Power station'. Erm....that was bloody 1997!!!! What on earth is he doing.

I am not surprised learned literary critics are taking offence. I only read about one book a decade and even I am spotting his howlers. If he was this bad at English at school I'm not surprised his teachers gave him such a hard time. Is it just me or does he get his dates in a muddle.

Please please don't mix your decades up. I nearly went to the Battersea gig but like others, I turned back when I realised it was some tech company jolly. Now...what decade are we in...


At first I was perplexed and taken aback by the last 30% of the book, but ended up really enjoying it. It flowed freely with no rules and I appreciated that style of writing. Page after page his writing was like a pinball in a pinball machine, rocketing around fast & free. Lots of neat stories & some interesting surprises. I'd like to see more writing like this.
 
I think it worked quite well, stylistically. I think the book shows how in the early years, each album was an event, and worthy of talking about. By the end, Morrissey seems to be sucked into a confusing blur of show after show after show....
 
What annoyed me about that part of the book was that you FINALLY made it out of the court case section and then you have Morrissey starting to talk about stuff that seemed really genuinely interesting and completely unknown to us - kidnapping attempt in mexico FFS! But he'd only spend a few lines on things that left you going "wait, 4000 pages on the court case, and this only gets 2 lines?!"
 
What annoyed me about that part of the book was that you FINALLY made it out of the court case section and then you have Morrissey starting to talk about stuff that seemed really genuinely interesting and completely unknown to us - kidnapping attempt in mexico FFS! But he'd only spend a few lines on things that left you going "wait, 4000 pages on the court case, and this only gets 2 lines?!"

The book could really have been twice as long.

In fact, his time in The Smiths - if it has been covered in full; talking about each album, their top singles, his songwriting process with Marr, anecdotes about the band and coming clean about why the split really happened - could have taken up the entirety of the book.

He could even have spoken about some Smiths songs and revealed who and what they were really about. I know keeping the mystique is important but it would be nice for him to have opened his heart about some songs, for example I Won't Share You, There Is a Light etc.

I did enjoy Autobiography but I wish he would just drop the bravado and write like a normal, down to earth person. Reading it was like a drunk, semi-conscious person telling you they have a juicy bit of gossip for you, and they get some of it out before they fall asleep, and you're left frustratingly slapping them trying to wake them up.

On top of that you could have devoted as many pages as were spent on the court case to each of the following periods in his life - post split up until he starts working with The Lads, the Arsenal to Maladjusted era, the 'wilderness' years pre-Quarry and then another section of ROTT to present.

I would have preferred it to have been written in chronological order this way, because with the way it actually was written - going backwards and forwards in time, no chapters, going off at a tangent on subjects - makes you wonder how much of it is true and how much is Morrissey spin and how much is 100% made up.

It isn't written in a trustworthy fashion.
 
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