Review 'His mind, officially measured as off the Mensa scale, is an object of wonder. But it swivels everywhere like a dropped high-pressure hosepipe . . . Gill is explosive. God knows what a frightening thing he must have been in drink. He is bad enough as a dry drunk, the kind of sober person who gets thrown out of restaurants (in his case, Gordon Ramsay's). But the end of the book dwells on a recently evolved philanthropic side to Gill's character. He has become very anxious about the world. He travels to awful places, eloquently and genuinely compassionate with the suffering he witnesses there ... One deduces that he has transcended his suffering but he now has a hypersensitive sympathy with the suffering of others. A A Gill is 61, 30 years sober and surviving. Those who admire him (and I am one) will not merely read him over the years to come but follow him wherever he is now going. It will, one guesses, be an interesting journey' (John Sutherland NEW STATESMAN)'A.A. Gill, the man who makes a living getting beneath the skin of things, whether it's television, restaurants or places round the world - has skinned himself ... The funny, curious, sad and often sodden stories are told using combinations of words and ideas that shouldn't be friends, but hold hands at the behest of Gill, like a circus master with a comma for a whip. This is a book full of darkness, laughs and dark laughs. Personal truths by a man whose love of language is ultimately the protagonist' (VANITY FAIR)'[Gill] writes passionately and movingly about his struggle with dyslexia; disarmingly and defensively about his lifelong feelings of intellectual insecurity; evocatively about his relationships with his parents and the disappearance of his brother . . . stirringly about his love of journalism . . . It might not all be beautiful; it might not all be true. But that does little to diminish the pleasure to be found in its story' (Matthew Adams INDEPENDENT)'Fluent, cocky and dense with gags . . . he is a brilliant raconteur, and a gifted satirist of place and person. He is also, perhaps through a history of AA meetings (those initials are well chosen), unafraid to take risks of self-exposure. The baroque debauchery of his drinking days gives way to frank and often moving examinations of his growing up . . . his loves and lusts and marriages, and his own efforts at fatherhood: the role that has done most to keep him sober' (Tim Adams OBSERVER)'As readers of Gill's journalism will expect, Pour Me is alert, emphatic, mordant, unforgiving. It is often moving, but never tries to be likeable. Honesty about alcoholism is not its chief attraction. It is a full-blooded retrospective by a man aged 61, who has travelled in remote and dangerous places, and has considered most human possibilities. He apologises for his book being insufficiently amusing ("it's about me, and I'm not really funny"), but his gallows comedy gives a hefty kick, many sections are beautifully droll, and some scenes are hilarious' (Richard Davenport-Hines SUNDAY TIMES)'In this chilling, exquisitely moving book, Gill defines the seductive, addictive and destructive power of drink . . . Gill's trademark is slamming the truth down hard on the page. It is his honesty that accounts for the intensity of this haunting memoir . . . and although he says this is not a funny book, it is . . . there are meditative passages of beauty here . . . A book that began by discussing lost time becomes one of recovered time, of a new way of life that is worth not only living but also celebrating' (Juliet Nicolson DAILY TELEGRAPH)'It's an intense, succulent read that's intermittently dazzling - 250 pages about a young life nullified by anxiety and addiction and not one cliche, each sentence earning its keep. Gill's regular readers might expect that but his willingness to expose his deepest insecurities, his apparent belief that, even now, he's an imposter, method-acting being normal, makes him newly vulnerable . . . There's no triumphant, teary-eyed conclusion: Gill says he's still no clearer on whether he drank because he was anxious and depressed or that he was anxious and depressed because he drank. As he says, it probably doesn't matter. What he knows is that for all his success now, he will always mourn the blackout of those years, the prime decade of his life just a cigar box of dog-eared postcards and incoherent memories. The saddest thing of all, it turns out, is absence' (Carol Midgley THE TIMES)'Pour Me, Gill's sweet-sour memoir of his drinking days and subsequent reform . . . is a delight. In pages of well-turned anecdote, Gill chronicles a rackety life made good. The book is nicely designed, moreover, and I liked the discussions of, among other things, the difficulties of parenting and marriage in late middle age' (Ian Thomson SPECTATOR)'This tonic memoir is the absolute works . . . As an autobiographer, A.A. Gill is unhampered by introspection. He observes his former self from without, dispassionately, unsparingly, as if grimacing at some squalid exhibit in memory's museum, an exhibit from a different age that has little to do with the successful, prolific sexagenarian journalist and random stirrer. Indeed he's promiscuously interested in just about everything save himself. The scope of his knowledge is phenomenal . . . His descriptive prose is polychromatic and specific. He is impatient with 'impressionistic' approximations . . . He judges neither himself nor others . . . The aberrant behaviour, the bodily dysfunctions, the wondering how you ended up here, with these people you have never seen before - all this is recalled with impeccably grim comic timing' (Jonathan Meades COUNTRY LIFE)'A superb memoir - and one of the best books on addiction I have ever read . . . beautifully written. Gill describes many things - people, works of art, parts of London - wonderfully well. He says he wanted to be an artist. He is - with words' (William Leith EVENING STANDARD) Book Description A. A. Gill's compulsive memoir of the days lost to addiction. See all Product description
T**S
Final chapter
Billed as a book on recovery and addiction, Pour Me is really an autobiography centred on the "fold" in Gill's life where he gave up the demon drink and the demon drugs. In aiming to recapture a decade or so's lost time, the author instead provides the essential context for the life that was to follow.Whilst writing the book, Gill was clearly very aware of his mortality, having been diagnosed with the “full English” of cancers that would kill him before many of us were able to finish the book.The result is not a maudlin recollection but rather a celebration of a life well spent, and decisively reconfigured after the dark drinking days which open the history but do not dominate it.In telling us the story, Gill jumps from school, to home, to work, to rehab and back. More like Slaughter House Five than a traditional biography. The time traveller can see all history at once, as per Vonnegut, and what he sees is that that redemption is an altered awareness of what is important and, as per Emerson, or whoever said it, life is a journey not a destination.The deepest despairs before Gill finally gives up the drink, and the circling of the drain which lead up to it, are mirrored almost exactly with the accession through career and family to the fine appreciation of meaning. The well connected, celebrity status of later years are equally offset by the troubled, lonely and meandering early years.As a reader, you're with him all the way.The author at times alludes to what might have caused his alcoholism. Was it rejection, loss, his almost ironic dyslexia, a precursor to his fabulous prose, or even, almost as footnote in the final chapter, an inability to cope with boredom? If there is one thing his later life never is, it is boring. Gill vividly captures the variety and excitement of the major events in his life, but also the minor moments of kindness and intimacy which in the end, lead him to reflect on a life well lived.A masterclass in writing, and a riveting description of a truly fascinating life.
K**Y
intelligent, sumptuously written - oh how he would have ...
Buy everything that Gill has ever written, and read them all as many times as you can handle...Someone much wiser than myself has once said that, the works that are written in order to impress others, scripts written because 'ah this would make 'em laugh', basically works written with overwhelming care of what others might think when they read them, are cynical exercises that will never work. Works that are for the ages and for repeated visits over and over again are works written by people with supreme intelligence- and they would be the last ones to really care about that- who are just trying to amuse themselves. AA Gill has never worried about what others might think of him. He never wrote due to his dyslexia, he constructed those blindingly stunning passages in his head and simply have them transcribed. They came out just so, no correction and no cutting and pasting. How the hell did he do that? And I still cannot believe that we are now left behind to read and reread all the works that he has left, and forever denied more of his incredible words. Is it true that there is a power greater than us and it tends to be envious of the exceptionally gifted? This memoir is no more than what I have come to expect from A. A. Gill, sardonic, intelligent, sumptuously written - oh how he would have hated to be described thus, dark, funny, darkly funny; he mourns the loss of the those years spent in alcoholic haze, yet somehow find such a way to describe it that I will not ruin it by trying to mention them here. so, read the book, and go to all his other books and read them all over again.
B**W
Great writing, but don't bother with the audiobook...
AA Gill has to be one of my favourite journalists ever. Brilliant, cruel, witty, humane - all at the same time. It was terribly sad he had to leave us with still so many columns left to write. While the content of this book is great, I was massively disappointed with the audiobook. Fellow Scot, Dougray Scott, (whom I have always quite liked as an actor) just sounds rather bored by what he is reading. There are a few passages where he sounds like he is enjoying himself, but these are sadly few and far between. If I was to be very charitable, it could be that he is trying to sound deliberately sardonic; he knew Gill, so maybe he thinks he is channelling his wry style. If that is what he is, it doesn't work. TBH at times, it boggles the mind why the producer didn't say "Now Dougie, maybe read that passage so it sounds like you actually give a ****." A shame.
N**N
Great insights from the inside of alcoholism
Beautifully written in places, always rather disturbing, deeply insightful, 'Pour Me' is an encouraging story about how an alcoholic managed to give up drink and make a worthwhile and often-happy life for himself. Not quite good enough to be an artist, AA Gill ended up becoming a much-admired cook and journalist. His analyses of drunken life are fascinating. "Waking up is not a given for a drunk," he writes. "It's not a simple transition..A drunk's awakening has layers and protocols...There is the panic of unresolved fright left over from the badlands of sleep. Every drunk has a procedure for getting things locked back and away in their crypts and cages." But he realises that "Happiness is the only prize worth holding or giving" and works at it. Readers of his journalism probably know this (and I have not read him before) but he has great insights and puts them clearly. For instance: "There is no correlation between more success and heavier happiness." Having said that, at times the pace slumped. Like Tony Adams in his drinking/ stopping drinking autobiography 'Sober', Adrian Gill seems to be packing out the book in some places. Oddly, although I like what he wrote and admire him for his gifts and honesty, I found it hard to warm to him. I am not sure why that is. Maybe it is because he was such a wild person and so unrestrained that he seems potentially dangerous. Yes, look at the photo of him on the cover. He looks like Jim Morrison.
L**S
The best writer of our age
A frank and surprisingly playful exploration of life and love and drinking, from the pen of a man who writes like an angel.
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