Devious, Truculent, and Unreliable

"For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph. 'Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big,' he writes, and off we go–into the Irish diaspora in the inner-city Manchester of the 1960s, where packs of boys playfully stone rats to death, and 'no one we know is on the electoral roll'. In some of the writing, you can almost taste his environment: 'Nannie bricks together the traditional Christmas for all to gather and disagree … Rita now works at Seventh Avenue in Piccadilly and buys expensive Planters cashew nuts. Mary works at a Granada showroom, but is ready to leave it all behind.' And when pop music enters the story, he excels. Before the Smiths, Morrissey fleetingly wrote reviews for the long-lost music weekly Record Mirror under the name Sheridan Whiteside, and his talent for music writing is obvious. By the late 60s, he is marvelling at hit singles by the Love Affair, the Foundations and the Small Faces; in 1972, as with so many thousands, he marvels at David Bowie miming to Starman on an ITV pop show called Lift Off With Ayshea. 'It seemed to me that it was only in British pop music that almost anything could happen,' he writes, which is spot on."

John Harris in The Guardian reviews Morrissey's Autobiography.