Publisher's Synopsis
Alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, this memoir tells how an ostensibly loving, even enviable 1970s boyhood - with a large house in London, and a holiday home in Praia da Luz - degenerated into a fiasco of drunkenness, anti-semitism, and neglect.
It's a touching story of how a sensitive, stammering boy almost self-destructed completely with drink as he battled anxiety and depression - only to turn what he was always told was his greatest curse into a virtue.
Along the way Kupfermann wittily evokes a brutish decade in which children suffered in silence, senior educators occupied a compassion-free zone, and parents could seclude themselves in phone-free paradise.
Ultimately, it's also a story of love and forgiveness as the author comes to understand his parents' emotional pain, and how good people came to do bad things.
FROM THE BOOK 'Drunks delude themselves that they're cultivating great fun memories. How was it then that boozing had always ushered in anger, guilt, anxiety, conflict, self-loathing, recriminations, and violence?' 'The only crime recorded that summer of 1977 in Praia da Luz was petrol being siphoned out of hired cars. Well, apart from beating the shit out of a child. But no one noticed that.' 'I enjoyed a solitary hillside walk above our villa in Praia da Luz and found the field laden with Mediterranean marigolds, oxalis, and mimosa. I could never have shared my delight with anyone of my own age. They'd have thought I was a pansy.' 'Problem drinking is not just for alcoholics.'
