#undoctored

there's a certain kind of appeal to memoirs that leave you thinking 'waterboarding couldn't have gotten this out of me' on a roughly every-other-page basis. and whatever the name for that appeal this book has it in fucking spades

I tend to avoid TV appearances because they can radically increase the frequency of being accosted in Ryman's. For me, the downsides of featuring on a panel show far outweigh the appearance fee and the opportunity to sit between Josh Widdicombe and Romesh Ranganathan for two hours and pretend to make spontaneous jokes, despite having been sent the topics to prepare three days earlier. (I realise this is the 'Santa Claus' bombshell for middle-aged men. I'm sorry you had to find out this way.)

I was about to do my big reveal to the man still behind the counter when he told me he'd already read it and it wasn't really his thing - he didn't know why it had been bothering the charts. It tries a bit too hard to be funny, he said, and fails entirely on that score. And that endless swearing, how very clever. He's all for an unlikeable protagonist, he wanged on, but the author of this book just seemed a little bit too much of an arsehole. In short, he concluded, in a field of a thousand medical memoirs, I could do a lot better. Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, perhaps? I couldn't face turning around to see my mother's face.

I have to break my own rule whenever I have a new book coming out, though, because publishers insist on a decent slug of publicity to minimise the percentage of copies being turned into garden mulch.

But more than that, a strange feeling I wasn’t quite me – I’d left something behind in New Zealand and come home in an Adam-shaped body that didn’t quite fit.

I didn’t particularly care for the idea that I wasn’t there on my own merits either – no one does – but at least I had the sense to keep my mouth shut.

Not everyone at my school worked hard – I knew loads of pupils who were phoning it in, killing time until they got to the serious business of failing every exam and walking straight into a job in their daddy’s shipping firm. So no, compared to those fuckers, I was there on merit.

He told me he was sorry medicine wasn’t the right job for me – he only wanted me to do it because he hoped I would love it as much as he did.