Reviews…
A Tipsy Fairy Tale
A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption
Kirkus Review - “Murphy recounts his tumultuous childhood in New York City and travels to his birthplace in Wales in a memoir interspersed with his poetry. In a preface, the author notes that writing “helped me rise from the ashes and give it another go.” Via second-person narration, he shares his life story: Murphy’s American father, Eddie, met the author’s mother, Thelma, whose family operated the Windsor Castle Hotel (“neither a castle nor a hotel, but a run-down pub in Newport, a run-down city in South Wales”), when he was stationed abroad during World War II. The couple settled in New York City, but Thelma was unhappy, per Murphy, who recalls her behavior through his child’s-eye view….” READ MORE.
California Review of Books - “Peter Murphy relates the story of his adolescent and youthful perpetual drunkenness in the second person, addressing the person whose life he explores as “you” with a particular effect. Most often when writers use the “you” subject they mean to create a bond between writer and reader, as if the reader could be enduring the same experiences. But instead Murphy is capturing the distance between the man he is and the youth he was, a person whose deeds he recalls with a degree of detachment. This “you” is a person functioning in a form of stupor, obsessed with the persistent need for drink that makes him constantly tipsy, a person baffled from full awareness, someone capable of blacking out for entire days, an inauthentic Peter Murphy….” READ MORE.
Medium - “Funny thing is, Peter E. Murphy’s memoir, A Tipsy Fairy Tale, is all in the 2nd person point of view, a rarity for this particular genre, so on its most literal level, Murphy has flipped the maxim on its head: Murphy’s story is about ‘you.’ And like any good rule-breaker, Murphy shows us that his story can give us all hope for redemption….” READ MORE.