“In the lacunae of language men and women understand different things about personal boundaries. What men call privacy, women know as secrecy. For men, privacy means not being told stuff that would hurt. For women, secrecy is having stuff go on behind your back.”
This is just a snippet in the well of wisdom that is UNCLE DYSFUNTIONAL, a collection from Esquire’s advice columnist, the late, great, acerbic abolisher of bosh, A A Gill.
Unhaltingly hilarious and unfalteringly funny, unflinchingly unflattering to the foolish followers of the fashion of political correctness, Gill is more likely to sneer and scorn as smile and sympathise, but his scathing analyses of what ails modern humankind is sublimely sage.
The pricking of male pomposity is a prevailing pursuit, from penis size, performance anxiety and the chagrin of chauvinism in all its shagging centric chamber-pottyness.
And in the pricking, never missing the opportunity for a good dick joke.
Speaking of which, the book ends with an advice seeking missive from the great twat of tweet, Donald Trump. It is appalling in its acuity and inarticulation.
It’s not all sex and shallowness, the advice sometimes hits the celestial and spiritual.
Asked if there is a God, Gill bats back with an Uh uh, wrong question, hitting a six, and summing up with the real question is; if you knew there was a god, would you behave any differently and if the answer is yes, then perhaps you should assume there is.
No assumption of the glee that this book will bring, though, a collection of slings and arrows targeted at the Achilles Heel of modern manners, a quiver of comic, coruscating arrows that bulls eye the bull shit.
UNCLE DYSFUNCTIONAL by A A Gill is published by Allen & Unwin-Canongate
