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Fitting In
"Everything in this book is true. You might think some things are just too unbelievable or funny or silly to be true, but every tiny detail really did happen."
Take one small boy; add manic depression, three wives, three daughters, two divorces, amazing creative talent, and Asperger's syndrome. In this memoir, Colin Thompson invites you to explore his almost-unbelievable life from past to present, though not necessarily in that order. Filled with family photographs and mesmerising illustrations drawn by the author himself, prepare to step inside the life and mind of an extraordinary man.
If you, or your friends or relations, have ever felt that you do not fit in this world, then this book will tell you how one person survived it all.
Take one small boy; add manic depression, three wives, three daughters, two divorces, amazing creative talent, and Asperger's syndrome. In this memoir, Colin Thompson invites you to explore his almost-unbelievable life from past to present, though not necessarily in that order. Filled with family photographs and mesmerising illustrations drawn by the author himself, prepare to step inside the life and mind of an extraordinary man.
If you, or your friends or relations, have ever felt that you do not fit in this world, then this book will tell you how one person survived it all.
224 pages, Hardcover
Published June 21, 2016
1 person is currently reading
324 people want to read
About the author
Colin Thompson
124 books124 followersSince he started writing and illustrating children's books in 1990, Colin Thompson has had more than 50 books published. He has received several awards, including an Aurealis Award for the novel HOW TO LIVE FOREVER and the CBC Picture Book of the Year in 2006 for THE SHORT AND INCREDIBLY HAPPY LIFE OF RILEY. He has been shortlisted for many other awards, including the Astrid Lindgren Award - the most prestigious children's literature prize in the world.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Colin lives in Bellingen, Australia. His books with Random House Australia include HOW TO LIVE FOREVER, numerous picture books, THE FLOODS series, THE DRAGONS series, THE BIG LITTLE BOOK OF HAPPY SADNESS picture book, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Children’s Book Council Award for Best Picture Book, and FREE TO A GOOD HOME.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Colin lives in Bellingen, Australia. His books with Random House Australia include HOW TO LIVE FOREVER, numerous picture books, THE FLOODS series, THE DRAGONS series, THE BIG LITTLE BOOK OF HAPPY SADNESS picture book, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Children’s Book Council Award for Best Picture Book, and FREE TO A GOOD HOME.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 18, 2018
5★s
What an intriguing, artistic piece of literature. With intricate, inventive illustrations and evocative descriptions of his colourful life, Thompson shares a deeply personal view of the world from inside both the manic and depressive states of his troubled mind.
He opens his memoir at the point where he’s living quite primitively on a tiny island off of Scotland, where he and his then wife are having a go at being weavers and potters, a place they lived and raised two little girls for 20 years.
Then he takes us back to his childhood, spent mostly with his bitter, snobbish mother, but with regular escapes for holidays with her sister, his Uncle Ted, and 4 noisy cousins. Everyone should have a “Giant Uncle Ted, who at weekends took us into the empty laundry where he was the manager and let us ride the conveyor belts up into the roof, high over the silent machines, and fall off the end onto mountains of dirty clothes.”
His mother tells him his father was evil (he left, so Colin never knew him), and Colin thinks he was the reason his dad left, an inauspicious start for a little fella. The only normal family life he has is with Uncle Ted’s family.
The boy Colin copes pretty well, but about the time he hits puberty, he starts having the first of the problems that will affect his outlook for the rest of his life. Mind you, he also discovers sex, which he loves and glories in, which leads him to the many women around whom he wraps himself and to whom he devotes himself until . . . he just can’t anymore. Then he escapes suddenly and with no money to Mallorca to the warmth and sun.
And he discovers music. A certain kind of music.
“The music leapt into my veins and burst into my head with frantic excitement. Rhythm and blues synchronised with the beat of my heart, a door opened that would never close and I flew into another world.”
Then he sees a play on the BBC with Bob Dylan.
“And very soon after that his first album came out, and bits of me that had been asleep woke up and stayed awake forever.
And it did matter what those words were.
The came from another world too and even when they didn’t make sense they said everything .
I didn’t want to dance around the room.
I didn’t even want to stand up
I didn’t know why, but I knew that things would never be the same again. And a massive, wonderful sadness woke up inside me and everything seemed to get bigger and bigger”
He has a series of stays in loony bins (his term), wolfs down Librium and whatever might help stave off depression, but eventually it has little effect except to make him weary and dull.
He also lives in some real dives—we can smell the cooking, imagine tripping over the stacks of papers, magazines and neatly folded chip wrappers lining the stairs on the way up to the toilet in the house of the hoarder landlady.
He always drew in black and white as a child, and finally, having trundled around with his portfolio to children’s book publishers, he is told he needs colour, so he goes home and redraws the one below in colour. Then a publisher tells him he should write a book himself. And she keeps insisting to the point that he finally does.
And that led to a delightful body of picture books for which he is known today.
Some Aussie schoolboys raised the price of a ticket for him to fly to Australia to meet them, such was the love for Looking for Atlantis.
He fell in love immediately (as he does) with the woman who met him and who has now been his wife for 20 years. No need for Mallorca now.
Thanks to NetGalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for my copy of this wonderful book.
He says My first coloured picture since I was a little boy.” He also says he is red-green colour-blind!
(photo from http://artodyssey1.blogspot.com.au/20...)
What an intriguing, artistic piece of literature. With intricate, inventive illustrations and evocative descriptions of his colourful life, Thompson shares a deeply personal view of the world from inside both the manic and depressive states of his troubled mind.
He opens his memoir at the point where he’s living quite primitively on a tiny island off of Scotland, where he and his then wife are having a go at being weavers and potters, a place they lived and raised two little girls for 20 years.
Then he takes us back to his childhood, spent mostly with his bitter, snobbish mother, but with regular escapes for holidays with her sister, his Uncle Ted, and 4 noisy cousins. Everyone should have a “Giant Uncle Ted, who at weekends took us into the empty laundry where he was the manager and let us ride the conveyor belts up into the roof, high over the silent machines, and fall off the end onto mountains of dirty clothes.”
His mother tells him his father was evil (he left, so Colin never knew him), and Colin thinks he was the reason his dad left, an inauspicious start for a little fella. The only normal family life he has is with Uncle Ted’s family.
The boy Colin copes pretty well, but about the time he hits puberty, he starts having the first of the problems that will affect his outlook for the rest of his life. Mind you, he also discovers sex, which he loves and glories in, which leads him to the many women around whom he wraps himself and to whom he devotes himself until . . . he just can’t anymore. Then he escapes suddenly and with no money to Mallorca to the warmth and sun.
And he discovers music. A certain kind of music.
“The music leapt into my veins and burst into my head with frantic excitement. Rhythm and blues synchronised with the beat of my heart, a door opened that would never close and I flew into another world.”
Then he sees a play on the BBC with Bob Dylan.
“And very soon after that his first album came out, and bits of me that had been asleep woke up and stayed awake forever.
And it did matter what those words were.
The came from another world too and even when they didn’t make sense they said everything .
I didn’t want to dance around the room.
I didn’t even want to stand up
I didn’t know why, but I knew that things would never be the same again. And a massive, wonderful sadness woke up inside me and everything seemed to get bigger and bigger”
He has a series of stays in loony bins (his term), wolfs down Librium and whatever might help stave off depression, but eventually it has little effect except to make him weary and dull.
He also lives in some real dives—we can smell the cooking, imagine tripping over the stacks of papers, magazines and neatly folded chip wrappers lining the stairs on the way up to the toilet in the house of the hoarder landlady.
He always drew in black and white as a child, and finally, having trundled around with his portfolio to children’s book publishers, he is told he needs colour, so he goes home and redraws the one below in colour. Then a publisher tells him he should write a book himself. And she keeps insisting to the point that he finally does.
And that led to a delightful body of picture books for which he is known today.
Some Aussie schoolboys raised the price of a ticket for him to fly to Australia to meet them, such was the love for Looking for Atlantis.
He fell in love immediately (as he does) with the woman who met him and who has now been his wife for 20 years. No need for Mallorca now.
Thanks to NetGalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for my copy of this wonderful book.
He says My first coloured picture since I was a little boy.” He also says he is red-green colour-blind!
(photo from http://artodyssey1.blogspot.com.au/20...)
October 8, 2017
Turns out Craig Thompson wrote Blankets. Not Colin.
So I was in for a bit of a surprise.
Honestly, I couldn’t finish this book. I was uncomfortable at first, and then when I found out it was a completely different author than I was expecting, I was disappointed. I did keep reading, though. I thought that the illustrations that the author did were so incredibly detailed. It was amazing.
Unfortunately, the details of his sex life were just as detailed. I really didn’t need to know that.
So I stopped reading.
Thompson’s humor is wonderful, but the rest of the content just wasn’t for me. I’m sure other people will appreciate it though.
So I was in for a bit of a surprise.
Honestly, I couldn’t finish this book. I was uncomfortable at first, and then when I found out it was a completely different author than I was expecting, I was disappointed. I did keep reading, though. I thought that the illustrations that the author did were so incredibly detailed. It was amazing.
Unfortunately, the details of his sex life were just as detailed. I really didn’t need to know that.
So I stopped reading.
Thompson’s humor is wonderful, but the rest of the content just wasn’t for me. I’m sure other people will appreciate it though.
December 26, 2017
I enjoyed this book a lot as a memoir and as a view into the mind of someone on the autism spectrum/with Asperger's, rather than someone analyzing that condition itself. Be forewarned that if you're a fan of Thompson's juvenile books, this isn't a book for kids. It's a book by an older adult man looking back at his life, and there is plenty of colorful detail about sex and mental illness. The anecdotes and timeline jump around quite a bit, and we hear how awful Thompson's mother was, but we don't see a lot of backstory about why, so it's not exactly your traditional memoir. An added bonus is some of Thompson's fantastic drawings scattered throughout the book.
December 4, 2017
I loved it.
May 28, 2023
Interesting but disjointed account of an artist and author plagued by depression.
TW: Child sexual abuse
TW: Child sexual abuse
February 12, 2017
The title was what initially pulled my interest. I think most to all people can identify with the issue of belonging and all that it entails. I was not expecting it to be autobiographical for some reason but it was a pleasant surprise. The writing was clever and made me very emotional, I laughed and felt utterly depressed and full of joy along with the author. And I think I may have diagnosed myself with Asperger's.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews