Someone Else's Back Story

 I've been reading David Mitchell's memoir, Back Story. The funny David Mitchell. Not the Cloud Atlas guy. The framework of the story is this: David has a bad back so he goes on long walks around London, because that apparently helps with bad backs and, as he strolls, the sights he sees trigger memories, which he then recounts. This book was first published in 2012 but I didn't know that. Imagine, then, my pleasure when, having written and published Spine, my memoir about a bad back and how I attempted to cure it, a famous, funny man off the telly, had already written that book, thirteen years earlier. Well, isn't that wizard!

I needn't have worried. There's bugger all about his back in the book. We find out it is bad, but we don't find what he's done to it. The back is just bad. Perhaps it was born bad. It's just a malevolent back, his evil twin, born with Mitchell but set against him from the off, a muscle-adjacent Moriarty, the Skelator He Man can never defeat because it's a part of him. What a bounder of a back. 

The bits of London he strolls around are, coincidentally, the bits I know quite well, and spark off precisely none of his memories until he gets to Swiss Cottage, where he had a flat that has subsequently been demolished, and Kilburn, where he lives. I once went to a party in Kilburn, and on the way there the actress Tara Fitzgerald smiled at me and, once there, I fell down the stairs, hurting me and while lying on a bed recuperating a woman came in and attempted to molest me. That is a better anecdote than any of the stories in this book. 

It's not really Mitchell's fault. Nothing bad ever seems to have happened to him. Which is great for David but not much cop for the autobiography. What he has instead are opinions which, luckily, are often funny. David has opinions on dogs (not keen) Chinese food (not keen) and "being forced to do readings for BBC executives in the early 90's (not keen). If that last one seems a bit niche, a bit unrelatable, that may be a clue to the problem with this book. David Mitchell is very successful. He has never had a "proper" job apart from a gap year job working at the Oxford University Press (which, in itself, sounds quite good). He's been head-above-the-water-solvently-successful since he was 24. Even in the early days of his career when he's not on the telly, he's got a load of his Footlights alumni around him and is having a great time going to the Edinburgh Festival or acting in plays written by Stephen Fry (who left a jolly nice message on his answerphone). He has a loving family, went to a fee paying prep school, to a fee paying public school, where he was fast-tracked for Oxbridge in some sort of History Boys scenario. He gets to Cambridge, auditions for everything, discovers booze, becomes president of Footlights, (his deputy is Garth Marenghi) meets his life-long writing partner and, within a couple of years, has an agent, is being wined and dined by the BBC, as a prelude to working with everyone in the comedy firmament and - guess what - they all think he's great. The only thing missing is any sort of a love life, but don't worry by the end of the book he meets his perfect woman, falls rapturously in love, and marries her. And that's not even a spoiler because everyone knows that already. He can't believe his luck. 

Now. 

That's not how you do these things. Dizzying, vertiginous forward velocity isn't how you sell a memoir. It's rags to riches, not comfortable to the fucking Sun King. It makes his famous televised rants harder to fathom. Where's all this anger bubbling up from? Does he feel thwarted by relentless good fortune? Has it denied him a frail anecdotage? It's not required. Nothing particularly awful seems to have happened to David Niven, but in his memoirs he manages to pearl off story after story while smiling and tugging at his cuffs. He doesn't feel obliged to go puce, hammering a desk on a panel show. I'm not suggesting he should fabricate a hard life, but its hard to sympathise with someone who got everything he ever wanted. In fact, even after the book stops it gets better: he writes a popular history book, he becomes a family man, he portrays Shakespeare in a hugely popular Ben Elton comedy (having slagged off Blackadder). He grows a beard and it suits him. Everyone loved Ludwig. He swings and he hits every time. 

I don't want anything bad to happen to David Mitchell. That's not what this is. I think he's a funny man and I've liked a lot of his work. His voice is now the voice I hear when I read my novel, Fine. He is my every-nerd Paul Reverb, even though he looks nothing like how I imagined Paul, Paul's tall, but David Mitchell could really tell that story. And I appreciate his honesty. He could have just lied. He could have made up a terrible past like that A Million Little Pieces twat. The worst he can come up with is being forced to eat food he didn't like at infant school and his Grandad being a bit distant, except for when he's watching Pink Panther films. In fact, I've changed my mind. It's an incredible memoir precisely because he meets his good fortune and celebrates it. It is a rare book then, a man acknowledging his gifts, acknowledging his privilege, exploiting it with industry and verve and clubability, if that's a word, and spell-check seems to suggest it isn't. Fair fucks, David Mitchell. And I'm pleased that you haven't, in fact, written a memoir about having a bad back, despite the title. My book, Spine, remains number one in a field of one, which is how I like it. I have not trodden on a the toes of a more successful, more powerful man. Phew. We can maintain our mutual respect. 

Except...there is one thing. In the book, in a weird "gotcha" moment, Mitchell tells us, "Ah, you probably think I'm an atheist, because you think that's the most rational position to take, but it isn't, because we can't possibly know there's no God, so the most rational position to take is agnostic, which is what I am." Which, you know, is fine. Well, no, not really, but he has also claimed, elsewhere, that he absolutely does not believe in ghosts. He thinks they're nonsense, despite ghosts appearing as a part of every single culture in all recorded history, popping up in all human art, and in endless verified (and unverified, obviously) stories. Ghosts are an undeniable part of the experience of being a human being. They keep cropping up, unexplained, perhaps unexplainable. They're a preternatural phenomenon. They exceed our grasp. They may not always do so. I don't believe in ghosts as magic dead people. But I do  believe that not everyone who claims to have experienced one is mad, a liar, or out for my money. 

But David says God's cool, and ghosts are just bullshit. 

Not having it, so-called TV's Mr Angry Logic.