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A review by xterminal
Freddie and Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody by Mike Dawson
4.0
Mike Dawson, Freddie and Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody (Bloomsbury, 2008)
My general rule of thumb on memoirs is simple: I loathe them. I have encountered a few that have been worthwhile over the years (Ruth Reichl's food-porn series of memoirs, Wilson Smith's Just Dirt, a handful of others), but for the most part, they're uninteresting people going on about their uninteresting lives. Graphic novel memoirs alleviate this trend somewhat, as they tend to be short (at least), but there's still a divide between the really interesting memoirs (Alison Bechdel's much-praised Fun Home, for example) and the... others. (Blankets. For the love of god, Blankets.) I'm still not 100% sure on which side of the line Freddie and Me falls, but I'm leaning towards the “really interesting” side with the caveat that I'm about ten years older than Dawson, and grew up during Queen's true glory days; News of the World came out when I was eight (and “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” were unavoidable if you owned a radio). So seeing a band I was so fond of back in the day (and even now consider something of a guilty pleasure) through the eyes of someone who wasn't around until (ugh) Hot Space is quite amusing, in its way.
Freddie and Me is the story of Mike Dawson growing up. This probably won't surprise you given that it's a memoir. He gives us his early years through the lens of his obsession with Queen and his younger sister's parallel obsession with Wham!. (Anyone familiar with recent Queen history will know where this is going pretty fast.) While he keeps things firmly planted in the realm of Freddie Mercury and Co., we see Dawson's early life in England, his family's transplantation to America in the early nineties (where the kids didn't know anything but “We Are the Champions”, he tells us, until Wayne's World brought “Bohemian Rhapsody” back into vogue), his post-high school years, and some of his struggles to carve out a niche in the graphic novel world. Warts and all, of course, as most memoirs (especially graphic-novel memoirs) are.
Have you ever thought to yourself that it would be really cool to read a memoir with a few less warts? I think that's part of the reason I've become so fond of Reichl's books; she spends so much time telling us about the food that the nastiness gets not glossed-over, exactly, but dealt with on a lower key than one finds in most memoirs I've experienced. Dawson has the wart problem, in that he remembers some astonishingly traumatic events with far more clarity than any of the good stuff, but about halfway through the book, he has the sense to do something I've never seen in a memoir before: he steps back, looks at it all, and (using the example of an altercation with a neighbor's father when he was a child) ponders whether his memory is correct, or whether he's subconsciously doctored it over the years. That's tough ground for a memoir to cover, especially in the age when memoir after memoir is being exposed as more or less fiction, and Dawson is brave to do it, in my estimation.
Not a bad little book at all, this. Probably of more intrinsic interest to Queen fans than the rest of the world, for obvious reasons, but worth your time if you are (or were) one. *** ½
My general rule of thumb on memoirs is simple: I loathe them. I have encountered a few that have been worthwhile over the years (Ruth Reichl's food-porn series of memoirs, Wilson Smith's Just Dirt, a handful of others), but for the most part, they're uninteresting people going on about their uninteresting lives. Graphic novel memoirs alleviate this trend somewhat, as they tend to be short (at least), but there's still a divide between the really interesting memoirs (Alison Bechdel's much-praised Fun Home, for example) and the... others. (Blankets. For the love of god, Blankets.) I'm still not 100% sure on which side of the line Freddie and Me falls, but I'm leaning towards the “really interesting” side with the caveat that I'm about ten years older than Dawson, and grew up during Queen's true glory days; News of the World came out when I was eight (and “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” were unavoidable if you owned a radio). So seeing a band I was so fond of back in the day (and even now consider something of a guilty pleasure) through the eyes of someone who wasn't around until (ugh) Hot Space is quite amusing, in its way.
Freddie and Me is the story of Mike Dawson growing up. This probably won't surprise you given that it's a memoir. He gives us his early years through the lens of his obsession with Queen and his younger sister's parallel obsession with Wham!. (Anyone familiar with recent Queen history will know where this is going pretty fast.) While he keeps things firmly planted in the realm of Freddie Mercury and Co., we see Dawson's early life in England, his family's transplantation to America in the early nineties (where the kids didn't know anything but “We Are the Champions”, he tells us, until Wayne's World brought “Bohemian Rhapsody” back into vogue), his post-high school years, and some of his struggles to carve out a niche in the graphic novel world. Warts and all, of course, as most memoirs (especially graphic-novel memoirs) are.
Have you ever thought to yourself that it would be really cool to read a memoir with a few less warts? I think that's part of the reason I've become so fond of Reichl's books; she spends so much time telling us about the food that the nastiness gets not glossed-over, exactly, but dealt with on a lower key than one finds in most memoirs I've experienced. Dawson has the wart problem, in that he remembers some astonishingly traumatic events with far more clarity than any of the good stuff, but about halfway through the book, he has the sense to do something I've never seen in a memoir before: he steps back, looks at it all, and (using the example of an altercation with a neighbor's father when he was a child) ponders whether his memory is correct, or whether he's subconsciously doctored it over the years. That's tough ground for a memoir to cover, especially in the age when memoir after memoir is being exposed as more or less fiction, and Dawson is brave to do it, in my estimation.
Not a bad little book at all, this. Probably of more intrinsic interest to Queen fans than the rest of the world, for obvious reasons, but worth your time if you are (or were) one. *** ½