15/06/2021
Here's a treat for lover's of humourous memoir: TWO MUMS AND A DAD by North Shore author Toby Roberts. My review is below.
If possible, please support local independent bookstores. On the North Shore, you can get copies from The Burns Bay Bookery, Constant Reader or the Blues Point Bookshop.
TWO MUMS AND A DAD
Navigating adolescence, new schools, emerging s*xual urges, relations with the opposite s*x and ‘fitting in’ with a crowd of peers can be challenging at the best of times for most young boys. However, when you feel like a geeky nerd who looks like “an undernourished chihuahua”, your mother emerges to be a feminist le***an and you go to a conservative Anglican school, the challenge of being accepted might feel particularly overwhelming!
This was the case for young Toby Roberts whose new memoir of the 1980s reveals the plight he and his three siblings faced whilst watching their parent’s marriage unravel and their mother’s girlfriends move in to radically change the family dynamic and the pubescent boy’s view of what is normal.
In this unconventional setting, Toby forges ahead experimenting with drugs, s*x and rock ‘n roll. On the side, he plays in a youth orchestra. When attending his first football training session, taking up the sport in a futile attempt to impress girls, he rather embarrassingly replies to the coach’s question, “What do you play?” with “The violin, Sir”.
With bathos and laugh-out-loud humour, Roberts self-depracatingly recounts his youthful peccadilloes and misadventures along with more serious issues such as his father’s alcohol consumption and sometime violence. Think of him as a kind of Aussie-version mix between David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs.
Two Mums and a Dad is a tender, thoughtful true tale which will make you think deeply about school, family and love, about acceptance and peer pressures, about s*xuality and puberty. And as you contemplate such life issues affecting us all, you’ll be thoroughly entertained and experience the very best of mirth.
