Lucy Bastonme had a privileged 'West Brit' Dublin 4 upbringing. There was a holiday cottage in Connemara, tennis lessons and Mum baking profiteroles when friends came over for dinner... Lucy's dad was a VIP - so respected the family were given seats right at the front when Pope John Paul came to Ireland in 1979.
Yet this is misery memoir - it's angry, directionless; fatalistic. Lucy hates her life. And judging by the way she behaves I'm guessing she hates herself too.
Here she is, not yet twenty:
Abandoned one morning, I balanced in the listing bed - hung-over, make-up smeared, smelling of sex - and felt around for the remote control. I dully flicked through the channels, nothing on: cartoons, Mass, football, Mass. The layout of the church looked familiar. I sat up, tickled when I recognised Alison Hampton and her family sitting in a tidy row and Father Perry preaching from the altar. The cameras panned to the next reader approaching the podium: a woman in a tweed suit and scarf making self-consciously slow progression. Shoulders back, chin slightly raised, she adjusted her microphone, and in an accent more Anglo-Saxon than ever, my mother began reading. I got up and ran myself a bath. What was I doing with my life?
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