Philip Hensher
Smith & Moans
Reviewing Morrissey’s memoirs seems a peculiarly pointless exercise. If you were ever going to read it, you’ve read it by now – bought it within 12 hours of its publication, read it, reread it, covered it with annotations and red underlinings and marginal exclamation marks emanating from the eternal existential bedsit of the moaning adolescent soul. If you haven’t bought it by now, you’ve probably not much interest in Morrissey or The Smiths, or any of that.
Still, it’s a curious document, not least because Morrissey has persuaded Penguin to bring it out as a Penguin Classic – not even a Modern Classic – and to publish it evidently without the sullying hand of an editor. This may be the only Penguin Classic to contain the sentence
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