A Head Full of Blue Book

A Head Full of Blue is the journalist Nick Johnstone's intimate, often disquietingly honest, account of his battle with alcoholism. Johnstone got drunk for the first time at the age of 14. Alcohol seemed to stall the depression that had plagued him since childhood and by his late teens he was already drinking to excess. At university he was drinking "a can of beer before classes" and more often than not would "be sipping a beer at 8.45 in the morning". The booze was augmented by anti-depressants, bouts of self-mutilation and an emotionally destructive sexual relationship with Laura, a thrill-seeking hippie chick in his hall. By the time he left university he was a fully-fledged alcoholic. Johnstone unflinchingly details the binges, the periods of abstinence, the vomiting blood, the therapy sessions, the AA meetings, the constant gnawing need for alcohol and his long and very slow (and ongoing) recovery. He's particularly good at animating the shabby subterfuge of the alcoholic; describing how he took to hiding empty wine bottles in his wardrobe to avoid detection and how he tried to mask his drinking at work. Though Johnstone began writing this some five years after his last drink, it's clearly based on many of his own contemporary journal entries. This gives the book a quite unusual freshness and immediacy. However, much of the prose--lines such as "My thoughts were ice cubes playing a cello" for example--veers far too closely toward adolescent poetry to be entirely convincing. Although Johnstone may stray into "Diary of a Manic Street Preacher Fan" territory it is hard not to be moved by his frank, heartfelt memoir.--Travis ElboroughRead More