This is a predictable turn for any pop star memoir, as it is in life, but you wish it weren't so for this one.

In this stage of the book, and onward, the writer recounts his fights with the inevitable brood: journalists, lawyers, accountants, fans, other musicians (both Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney let him down by refusing to pose for photographs with him), and he spends more than 50 long pages aimed at Smiths drummer Mike Joyce and his claim for equal share of band royalties. The escape hatch is television - lengthy passages give us the scenarios of long-forgotten shows with titles like 'Little Big Time,' 'The Time Tunnel,' 'Mystery and Imagination,' 'Thunderbirds,' and the greatest of them all: 'Lost in Space.' Here, he tells us, were early lessons about life, relationships and masculinity. The weight of these passages is acute: '(T)hroughout these years I am a largely bedridden child unwilling to keep death at bay,' he writes. There is heaviness throughout this section, and also the best writing. Convincingly old, he is unable to praise, and his military servitude is the murdered child within.' Mother Peter is 'a bearded nun who beats children from dawn to dusk.' And Miss Redmond? 'Aging, and will never marry, and will die smelling of attics,' he writes. He is martyred by his position and is ruled by his apparent loathing of the children. 'Headmaster Mr Coleman rumbles with grumpiness in a rambling stew of hate. We spend the first third of the book moving through his suffering, and often violent, childhood, in a cold and grim Manchester where, with deadly precision, he lacerates the cruel and petty dictators of his Catholic education.

Autobiography by morrissey