My Own Worst Enemy

In this account of his childhood, Robert Edric writes of his upbringing in working-class Sheffield throughout the '60s and early '70s with both compassion and unflinching honesty. Based wholly on Edric's own memories and long-repeated family tales, this memoir reveals the small, often claustrophobic and inward-looking world which both formed him as a child and afterwards helped inform him as a writer. Chief among these interwoven recollections are the ordinary, everyday stories and memories of the day to day life of his own family and of the relatives and neighbours around him; of his education as a grammar school boy of that time; and, most particularly, of the lives of his parents, whose own childhoods during the Second World War and afterwards formed by far the most influential part of that upbringing.