The link might not be immediately obvious, but there are a few. Douglas Adams was a co-writer with Chapman on a sketch show. He also wrote some material for Monty Python.
More importantly, he's one of six writers allegedly behind this book. David Yallop, Alex Martin, Pedro Montt, David Sherlock, Douglas himself and of course there's some input from a geezer called Graham Chapman. I suspect Pedro Montt may be a fanciful addition to the list of writers since he's a dead ex-president of Chile....
When I picked this book up I wasn't entirely certain what to expect.
Now I've put it down again having read it, I'm not entirely sure what I just read.
It's certainly a pauntly enough read (those who've read the book will know what that means) and is laugh out loud funny in many places. However the opening chapters were a struggle to get through. The randomness that characterised Python humour was in full flow and then some. It made no effort in the opening chapters to give any type of coherent narrative, jumped about in time and even into space, and made zero sense. That type of knockabout randomness might (and does) work when on a screen, whizzing past in a matter of a couple minutes, but sustained over 20 plus pages, it's a bit of a chore to get through.
It's possible he's putting on paper the feeling of the DT's that he's going through in chapter nought, but I can't say for certain.
However the style did settle down considerably and the narrative is a lot less cluttered and more readable from that point on. It's almost impossible to know what is and isn't true in this book. Some of the falsehoods are obvious, the flights of complete fancy etc. Much of the rest of the book feels like anecdotes of reasonably amusing stories that have conflated over the years and expanded, so in the midst of the fabrication there's a real event or three going on.
There's one chapter that's actually incredibly moving (chapter 9 - where he lets a pair of young men stay in his house to keep them out of trouble with the law) and, confusingly enough, there are swathes of this book that feel like he's laying his soul bare on the page for us to see with seering honesty. He then spoils that effect every time with another digression into fanatasy.
I made the mistake of reading the chapters where he's at medical school while I was on my luch at work. This is not advisable. There is some gratuitously unpleasant description of mucus and pus filled orificeses.
The footnotes scattered through the book are used to great comic effect. He frequently seems to be having chats with his co-writers in the footnotes. Once the writing settled it was genuinely good fun to read. The pictures scattered throughout are also pretty funny. Try not to look at page 208 though.
The whole thing is very choppy, lots of little anecdotes with varying degrees of reliability in the telling. Being an autobiography, obviously it just peters out at the end, although he does manage to close off a running joke type thing in the final pages which gives for a definite sense of an end even though it isn't one.
I'm glad I finally got round to reading it. It's available from various online sources. I got mine from the charity section at the front of my local Tesco about two years ago.
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