The Feel-Good Hit of the Year (Liam Pieper, Hamish Hamilton)

Before he even graduated high school, Liam Pieper was the unlikely kingpin of a cottage drug racket, pushing all the pot, pills and powder he could get his hands on in the Melbourne suburb where he lived with his two brothers and erstwhile hippy parents. Young, socially inept, yet flush with cash and buoyed by feigned bravado, Pieper’s repeated run-ins with the law do nothing to impress on him the unsustainability of his would-be gangster lifestyle. What follows is a decade of self-deception, rootlessness, devastating family hardship and chronic substance abuse, all exacerbated by the author’s stubborn refusal to sit still and look his demons in the eye. Despite the gritty subject matter, Pieper’s memoir is very funny and packed with inventive expressions. Occasionally, when the sometimes-grating veil of performative irony and cleverness is cast aside, it’s moving too, painting an affectionate portrait of a family bonded by mutual foibles and grief. Autobiographical clichés appear: epiphanies hit in exotic, far-flung surrounds, and phrases such as ‘things would get worse, as it turns out’ spur us onto the next chapter. For the most part, though, this reads like a wittier, Gen-Y answer to perennial sellers such as Howard Mark’s Mr Nice and James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

Gerard Elson is a writer and bookseller who works at Readings St Kilda

Books+Publishing pre-publication reviews are supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund.

Category: Reviews