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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
so what?, 25 May 2004
It's very hard to know what to make of this book. I confess that the only reason I bought it was because I had read an absolutely savage review of it elsewhere, and I wanted to know what it was that had caused such bile on the part of the reviewer. Janet Street-Porter is one of those people who are always trumpeted as being "controversial", and her biog. certainly seemed to be having that effect, so I thought I would give it a go. The first thing I noticed was that I really wasn't getting as much as I thought I was. It's a small hardback, with big print and blank pages between chapters, an old trick to make a book look more substantial that it really is. Not only that but a lot of these pages are taken up with old desperately dull black-and-white family photographs. The publicity blurb markets the book as the answer to anyone wanting to know what it was that made J S-P the person she is, which can only result in a bemused shoulder-shrugging reaction as far as I can see! J S-P herself seems to want us to believe that she had a traumatic childhood. Now I don't know about you but when someone says they had a traumatic childhood, I think of harrowing tales I've heard of abuse, neglect, severe deprivation, putting up with alcohol- or drug-dependant parents, or growing up in the grimmest kind of Care. J S-P suffered none of these. She was well cared for, got given everything her hardworking parents could afford, was not beaten or abused, or humiliated on a regular basis. Her parents obviously weren't the warmest or most affectionate of people, but that was pretty par for the course for a lot of working-class families at the time. Their biggest "crime" was a lack of imagination, but in their own way they did want the best for her. Perhaps I missed something vital here, but J S-P gives us an example of something that happened when she was 14, which she seriously wants us to believe was an example of how "cruel" her parents could be ...er, they decided to move house. I had a sort of confused, open-mouthed reaction to that one! J S-P has said she didn't write this book as any kind of score-settling, but it sure as heck feels that way! Her constant crowing that her mother was jealous of her success, because her mother had to leave school at 14, just sounds horribly mean-spirited. It's like some terrible joke, the self-important media darling with the inflated ego ranting about what a deprived upbringing they had! This isn't exactly "Mommie Dearest" or "A Child Called It", more a 276-page whinge of "my parents didn't understand me". If you're interested in what it was like to grow up in a terraced house in Fulham in the 1950s, with the family listening to "Two-Way Family Favourites" over Sunday lunch, and summer holidays in North Wales (when the poor deprived darling would rather have stayed in London), then this is the book for you, for me it was a thundering disappointment. The most startling thing about it for me was the revelation that J S-P seems to have inherited her father's complete lack of a sense of humour!
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