I have real mixed feelings about this audio book. At first I was laughing and finding it all extremely funny. I love the asides to the production team she makes as she reads. Her accents are fabulous, apart from the Welsh one. That part was worth going back to listen to again, and then playing to my friend. However as the book went on I found myself hesitating a bit.
Daisy and Charlie are contracted to do a cleaning job for three hours, but manage to do it in 20 minutes. Well, of course they don’t manage to do it in 20 minutes, they do the absolute bare minimum which is obvious to the staff who have to work in a dirty environment. It’s also obvious to the manager who leaves them notes about how to clean more effectively. (ie actually do the job they’re being paid for.) I wondered how on earth they kept the job and didn’t get sacked. Are we really expected to feel sorry for them? It’s Daisy’s dream to act and to produce her own TV programme, so she takes low-grade jobs she can leave at any time which allow her to attend auditions, yet I feel that we are meant to sympathise with the fact that they don’t have any money and have to watch their friends eat McDonald’s and can never buy a coffee, or whatever, in return. This is clearly a choice!
There’s just so much about life being hard and general negativity about everything and everyone. It is very much a poor, poor me type of memoir. I’ve read much more positive accounts from holocaust and World War II survivors!
Even when things really do go their way and This Country finally gets commissioned to be made, it’s almost a cursory mention at the end and that’s it. There’s probably another book in the pipeline because there’s no mention of The Wrong Mans or David Copperfield which she acted in before This Country. Will she be complaining about James Cordon and Dev Patel next?
As for ‘accidentally’ spending the student grant on a London hotel’s penthouse suite before RADA, Daisy really doesn’t come off as very sharp. Or, she did realise at the time but didn’t care? I’ve seen that she had appealed for funds to go to RADA from the readers of her local newspaper. (That seems to be a thing which has been airbrushed from the book.) I wonder if her appeal successfully raised some money? And how givers feel reading this account about blowing over £3K on the penthouse suite?
She really doesn’t paint herself very sympathetically. Having no empathy or any sort of kindness, or understanding (even in retrospect) for the boy whom she met through a chat room, who had not told her about his disability, and then whom she did not speak to for the entire weekend he stayed (parents really, he slept in her room?!) She doesn’t do herself many favours in this book. I wonder if it’s all for comedic necessity.
The entire tone of the book is ‘Woe is me, look how people have treated me!’, from her first boyfriends, to her relationship (if you can call it that) living in Cirencester where she’s basically only there to get somewhere nicer to live, her feckless parents not keeping jobs and pawning inherited items, to her house share in Shepherd’s Bush with the Portuguese girls, attending traumatising RADA and on, and on, and on and on and on…. There is no hint of self reflection, or remorse about her choices and behaviour.
She came across well on Taskmaster, I find her really funny and loved This Country, especially coming from the same rural area I totally get it all, but this book does nothing to make me think she’s a particularly decent or kind person. I’m going to decide to take it all with a pinch of salt, otherwise I’ll end up thinking a lot less of her than I did.
3 1/2 stars
I’d be interested to read a book by Charlie Cooper. He comes across as a more thoughtful and reflective person.
11/2/22