Title: Just Ignore Him
Author: Alan Davies
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 278
Rating: 4/5
If I had to summarise this book in one word, it would probably be “harrowing”. And that wasn’t what I was expecting from a memoir by Alan Davies.
See, if all you know about Davies is based on QI and Jonathan Creek, you might not realise that his father was an asshole who physically and emotionally abused him. That all changes when you open up this book and read the opening chapter, which is all about Davies getting rid of some child porn that his father had printed from the internet.
On the plus side, it’s not all doom and gloom, and there are plenty of genuinely funny parts to this book, as well as a lot of stuff that’s touching without being quite so intense. His mother died when he was six years old of a terminal disease that his father and the doctors kept from her, and so it’s safe to say that he didn’t have the greatest childhood.
And yet he does write about his younger years with nostalgia, a kind of nostalgia I couldn’t really relate to because he was born a generation before me and so all of the pop culture references went over my head. I’d heard of the stuff he was talking about, but I’d not consumed it. We’re talking about TV shows that went off air before I was born and stuff.
Still, I’m glad that I read it and it made me appreciate Alan Davies even more than I already did. I’m glad he turned out okay.
