My Favourite People and Me 1978–1988, Davies. Non-fiction. Like Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, this memoir has what I think of as a non-traditional structure. In this case, each year constitutes a major section, with each of Davies’s “Favourite People” during that year given a sub-section. Unlike ZSW, the parts that are not straight-ahead memoir are contextual, historical, and atmospheric. The structural conceit is, unsurprisingly, stretched to the limit a number of times, with the nominal subject of a sub-section frequently taking a back seat to other notable people or events.
Given that Davies is a fairly thoughtful guy who grew up about the same time I did, I found it easy enough to identify with his accounts, though since he is English and I am not, I found the stories of exciting Cricket encounters less gripping than I otherwise might have. Even the football, of which I am also a fan, did go on a bit for my taste. I did find one parallel especially entertaining, though: In the 1979 section, he writes “There was a feeling amongst my peers that, culturally, American was best.” At the same time, my peers and I were discovering Monty Python, and had quite the opposite feeling. If I were to write a similar memoir, there could be several sequences in which my friends and I annoyed those around us by affecting ridiculous accents that we fancied were British.
Overall, it holds together reasonably well, and I enjoyed the opportunity to learn more about Davies than I had seen in QI.