Changes

The suburban 60s and 70s celebrity childhood memoir is an overcrowded field. We're bombarded with tales of fairly uneventful, slightly privileged, middle-class upbringings. As such, this book falls socially and intellectually between Andrew Collins's ''Where Did It All Go Right?: Growing Up Normal In the 70s''

Sincere and occasionally amusing as Jones's story is, it rarely justifies its existence beyond the the author's need for catharsis and closure. Yes, he is appropriately embarrassed at his precocious theatrical pretensions, and candidly moving about his caddish treatment of girlfriends. I identified with his hatred of sport and of organised religion, and with his contempt for domestic ritual. He even impressed me with the way he sprinkled architectural jargon around the text.