Since the early 1980s, Neil Jordan has been a conjuror, plucking from his hat one hyper-stylised movie after another, among them The Crying Game (1992), which won him a screenwriting Oscar, and the trans odyssey Breakfast on Pluto (2005), with Stephen Rea, the director’s alter ego and hangdog lookalike, as a lugubrious magician. The primary achievement, though, remains his opening hat-trick: the Troubles noir Angel (1982), the Angela Carter adaptation The Company of Wolves (1984) – a ‘fairy tale turned upside down and inside out’ – and Mona Lisa (1986), which takes Scorsese’s Taxi Driver for a spin around London and Brighton.

Jordan was a writer before he was a filmmaker and has never stopped being one. In his new memoir, Amnesiac, he explains that during his youth ‘Irish people didn’t make movies … What we did was we wrote, because a pen and paper cost nothing.’ He won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979 for his short-story collection Night in Tunisia, sharing the award with Dambudzo Marechera for his The House of Hunger. In his acceptance speech in the lobby of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, Marechera denounced the prize’s colonial stench, then hurled chairs at the mirrors. Five years later, in The Company of Wolves, Jordan showed well-heeled wedding guests beholding their own grotesque reflections in cracked glass.

What kind of memoir does an amnesiac write? The author admits, ‘I don’t trust memory’, fires off rhetorical questions (‘What age would I have been? Eleven, twelve? ... did we have a car then?’) and rarely tells a story without questioning the details (‘Or maybe it wasn’t like that at