Memoir

How Not To Be A Boy by Robert Webb & This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay

by James McNamara •

December 2017, no. 397

How Not To Be A Boy by Robert Webb

Canongate, $29.99 pb, 336 pp, 9781786890092

This Is Going To Hurt: Secret diaries of a junior doctor by Adam Kay

Picador, $29.99 pb, 256 pp, 9781509858651

Memoir

How Not To Be A Boy by Robert Webb & This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay

by James McNamara •

December 2017, no. 397

The literary world too often disdains comedy writing as unserious. It rarely features in our grander prizes, and is usually relegated to literature’s cheap seats. This is, of course, silly. Great comedy can make as many grave points about humanity as realist fiction. You just get to laugh along the way.

Two crackling literary memoirs by comedians show this seriousness of purpose. Robert Webb is best known for co-starring in the Mitchell and Webb sketch shows and the sitcom Peep Show. Given that pedigree, he could have written a memoir about professional glory and pissed banter with David Mitchell. But How Not To Be a Boy is more courageous, offering a Bildungsroman that examines the effect of his mother’s death on his early life, and the culture of toxic masculinity that muffled his grief and stifled his emotional growth (basically, everything you’d get in po-faced literary fiction – plus jokes).

James McNamara

James McNamara is an Australian television writer based in Los Angeles. His television work includes comedy and drama writers rooms for the Academy Award-winning See-Saw Films, Matchbox Pictures/NBC Universal, Foxtel, ABC, Porchlight Films, and Endemol Shine, and developing shows for Goalpost Pictures and Playmaker Media/Sony Pictures. McNamara received ABR’s third Ian Potter Foundation Fellowship for his long-form essay, ‘The Golden Age of Television?’ (ABR, April 2015), praised by Clive James as ‘a global contribution to cultural analysis’. McNamara’s essays and criticism have also appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator.

Born in Western Australia in 1982, McNamara received degrees in English and Law from the University of Western Australia, graduated in screenwriting from AFTRS, and holds a doctorate in English from Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. Before becoming a writer, McNamara was a litigator specialising in international disputes at a top-tier US law firm. He was recently named a BAFTA LA Newcomer.