Book review: A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A coming of age memoir of alcohol and redemption

Niall Griffiths

Lord, but this stuff brings out the curmudgeon in me.

I get the appeal to the reader who hungers for words yet is disillusioned with the artifice of narrative fiction and the manipulations inherent in such, and there is a stark honesty to this, but to this reviewer (and of course I understand how personal this is), it is profoundly dull, frustrating, exasperating.

It has its roots in the my-drugs-hell nonsense of Elizabeth Wurtzel and Augusten Burroughs and dodders it’s way through Peltzer and Knausgard and shrinks and shrivels the world with its solipsisms. I did this, I did that. This happened to me then this happened to me (or ‘you’, in Murphy’s chosen pronoun). Oh did it. Did it really. How fascinating.

Zadie Smith once said something about needing the next Knausgard volume like crack, but given the choice, I’ll opt for the crack. That’s the irony of these ‘recovery’ memoirs; they usually reawaken in me the needs and compulsions that they take as their business to disavow.

Primarily a poet

Anyway. Peter E Murphy (not to be confused with the lead singer of Bauhaus or the Gaelic football player or the author of John the Revelator) was born in Wales to a Welsh mother and American GI father and was taken to the US as a child.

His is an impressive CV; primarily a poet (and a good one, as his quoted stuff in Tipsy Fairy Tale proves) and a teacher of writing, he has held workshops across the globe, has been published widely, and has a particular teaching programme named after himself at Stockton University in Atlantic City (he is also, according to his website, on the Clintons’ Christmas card list, a baffling claim to fame which one suspects may be excised from his CV shortly). This isn’t his first memoir.

The ‘I’ is a ‘you’. Women are ‘The Beautiful One’, ‘The Crazy One’. There was abuse at the hands of a priest, as there always was. By my calculations, he was 25 when he gave up drinking, which he started doing at 15. He played basketball. He broke a bone. He had bad oral hygiene. He went ‘out on a date with alcohol. You’re shy at first. You hold hands. You make out….You gasp. You say “I love you” to the drink and ask it to go steady and the drink says “Yes, I love you too” ‘.

Oh God, is there more of this?

Self-deprecation

Dismayingly, yes there is, a lot more, because this is only the ‘Early-Derelict Period’. Isn’t it odd how such memoirs, in their ostensible self-effacement, cannot resist self-aggrandisement?. Titular delineations of one’s stages through life. Peculiar thing to do. ‘Silly boy’, he often calls himself. Silly boy. During a Vietnam War deferment exam, he is asked how his heart is, to which he replies ‘broken, but good’. Oh Lord.

He dabbles in poetry, his first experiments with which are depicted well, with endearing self-deprecation, and ask some intriguing questions concerning permanent truths through temporary falsehoods. And, as aforementioned, the Carveresque poetry is accomplished and is the book’s highlight: ‘your mouth is full/with the flavors of ordinary sleep’ is a great line in a fine poem, and this is extraordinary: ‘a yawn branches in waking/roaring with leaves/while there’s all this/waiting//what time do the flowers start’. I welcomed such excerpts with the sigh of respite.

He returns to the land of his birth in the late 60s and as history, this episode is engaging. He travels to Scotland and both Irelands where his American political naivety makes for some anecdotal diversions. These sections of the book are weighty with insight and discovery and meaningful revelation. There are menial jobs, squats, a John Tripp poetry reading which alerts him to the particular politics of Wales and Welshness and, by extension, Britishness. Good details here which accrete into self-realisation, self-actualisation. There is involvement in a quasi-cultish spiritual group which satisfies and fills the God-shaped hole which abandonment of institutionalised religion has left.

Hierarchy of soul-torment

There is some drinking, and that ‘some’ is loaded; there is little here on the mechanics and issues of  problematic use of intoxicants, let alone addiction, which begs the question (both embarrassing and necessary to ask): how hellish, exactly, was your unique hell? How low did you go?

This is relative, I know, and there is no hierarchy of soul-torment, but this is hardly on a par with, say, Bill Clegg’s Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man; there, the depiction of desperation and depravity sets the reader reeling, but here? Well, the ‘tipsy’ in the title says it all – not ratarsed, not shitfaced, not meths-for-breakfast true bilious rock bottom, just ‘tipsy’.

This is parcelled with the odd prudishness: there is no ‘fuck’ here but ‘fook’, even ‘freaking’ (out of the mouth of a Welshman in 1971? Really?). And is this how we measure descent, is this the gauge of dissipation?: ‘you think maybe you should get your ear pierced…and everything will be all right. Punch a hole in your ear and all your freaking problems go away. That’s how messed up you are’. Sigh. Not even in rehab have such horrors been uttered. And this in a book that contains a trigger warning.

I’m becoming flippant now. I’ll desist. As I say, there is a place for memoirs such as this. But, to me, solipsistic musings without recognisable catabasis are a symptom of socio-cultural malaise, and not, in any way, a scourge. But at least the poetry is good.

What’s that you say, barkeep? What am I drinking? Too much. Too much, and never enough. Never, ever enough.

A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A coming of age memoir of alcohol and redemption by Peter E Murphy is published by Toplight Press.