When he wasn't busy dreading his birthdays, dodging kids who wanted to kill him in a game of Toy Fights, working with his country-and-western singer dad, screwing up in the Boys' Brigade, obsessing over God, origami, The Osmonds, stamps, sex or Scottish football cards, he was developing a sugar addiction, failing his exams, playing guitar, falling in love, dodging employment and descending into madness.

Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson – The Irish Times

Paterson became an accomplished jazz guitarist and the book is, as he acknowledges, “music-obsessed”. It is rare to read an autobiography which balances acerbic, almost visceral, anger with moments of genuine tenderness and affection.

His father’s guitar playing also clearly had a strong influence on Paterson’s relationship with music, another major theme of the book.

Don Paterson: ‘The temptation is to sit on my backside’ Don Paterson: ‘The temptation is to sit on my backside’

Toy Fights I think is conscious of the terrain it steps out into, the literary context, and the risk of cliche. For Paterson, a successful poem strips back our experience to its constituent parts, revealing the ghosthood that lies beneath. In her hotly anticipated memoir, the author traces the challenges and triumphs of her upbringing in New Jersey and the work (including a stint as an intern with Sen. Discipline was enforced through corporal punishment: officially, the threat and practice of belting children insensible with an oven-baked Lochgelly, the fork-tongued, hand-tooled leather tawse.The book is full of admiration for the country-and-western guitar handiwork of his dad, a club-playing accompanist for whom “there was no wedding drunk, no obscure Barry Manilow B-side, no unannounced key change he didn’t seem instantly to have covered, and he could make anyone sound great. He is also an accomplished guitarist who founded and toured with a jazz ensemble throughout the 90s. Now, at the age of 59, Paterson has recently retired not just from Picador but from his role in the school of English at St Andrew’s University in Scotland. In his late teens, there was “my breakdown”, “like the arrival of the bailiffs, the ego’s dismantling by a brutally efficient team of hired contractors”. But the effort to describe the music – folk and pop and jazz – that he loved as an adolescent leads him into the book’s most rapt and heartfelt passages.

Don Paterson Home | Don Paterson

Paterson is angry about narcissists, about his old home city of Dundee (“Bungopolis”), about social media. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. It began as a circling, self-feeding fear, a fear of fear, a fear of fear of fear, that accelerated like the flywheel in a gyroscope, tightened on me as its epicentre, then made a kind of whirring lift-off: the sudden disappearance of the mouth and tongue, a terrible lightness underfoot, a weird bounce in the heels, and a tight band vicing one’s forehead. IMO he lost because his project, around mid 2018 buckled under the strain and simply gave up attempting to impose any discipline (or just recognised they had no means to). I guess where we probably completely diverge is that I think, 100%, that a political project that were to try to attempt to advance his priorities and expressed political preferences (which he characterises as centrist) would absolutely be pilloried in the political mainstream as extreme left, and likely subsequently totally dismantled by all the marshalled forces of the British elite (but not - crucially - by internet wokescolds, who would simply persist being annoying online).I lost interest in the later parts of the book, as the author (who is also a jazz musician) delves quite heavily into music. Would have liked to see more discussion of his creative process, and some insight into what made him such an accclaimed poet, but maybe that's all for a future volume? At the end, after a trawl through the Dundee club scene and its spectacular sexual shenanigans, he boards a train and sets off for London, guitar in hand. For a book that says ‘future classic’ on its dustjacket, it’s just strange and a shame that it fairly frequently seems to tie itself to considerations, unconvincingly drawn, occasionally bizarrely ungenerous, and for no pay off, and that really will date, fast. While he didn't manage to figure out who he was meant to be, the first twenty years of his life - before he took a chance, packed his guitar and boarded a train to London - did, for better or worse, shape who he would become.