This Memoir Takes A Sledgehammer to Notions of Masculinity

I was revisiting Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies when I stumbled upon Adam Farrer’s memoir, Broken Biscuits and Other Male Failures. I had been looking for a way to come to grips with U.S. politics, particularly with young males who are attracted to the ideology of the far-right. You can find me reading a memoir about as often as it snows in Miami, yet something in the description of Adam Farrer’s book spoke to me. Growing up, I too idolized an older brother and felt pressured by others’ notions of manliness—such as on the day my father asked a teenage me to choose between working with my hands or with my head. So, I ordered Broken Biscuits—unpublished in North America until this November—from a UK outlet. 

Adam chronicles his struggles as a young, working class man finding his place in his family, in his town, at school, and at work. There were people in his life who expected Adam to conform to their image of the world, and when he bucked those presuppositions, even in benign ways, Adam endured significant resistance. The simple act of needing glasses to see “placed me among the ranks of the helpless. I may as well have been fitted with a back brace and a note around my neck asking everyone to be kind to me about my chronic bed-wetting.” Or, male students at school hitting him with paper airplanes, one that included an “angry scrawl” that read “fucking queer.”

As the saying goes, I laughed; I cried. Adam’s openness about his life in Broken Biscuits captured my attention as did his literary craft. Rather than unpack his story in a diaristic mode, he takes an episodic approach, focusing each chapter on an event or topic, such as the unflattering encounter with a sex shop clerk when he, in his sexual and social naivete, walked in the front door. Via email, Adam and I discussed his humorous approach to storytelling, his take on memoir—even though Adam thinks of himself more as an essayist than a memoirist—how stage writing influenced his prose, the fact that he didn’t want this book to become what in the UK is called a “misery memoir,” and much more. 

Bruce Krajewski: In an interview on Paul Cuddihy’s podcast, you mention admiring Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, in part because of Sedaris’s ability to make the reader alternately laugh and weep, a quality you’ve captured in Broken Biscuits. Does a person ever grow weary of being called “the David Sedaris of the UK”? Why did comedy become an important part of your storytelling?

Adam Farrer: I guess the foundation of it would be that I’m from a family that has always floated through any kind of trauma on a carpet of humor. During difficult times we look for those moments where we can make each other crumple with laughter, which gives us a necessary release and makes enough room for us to talk about the difficult stuff. I wasn’t conscious of this until I started examining my life through writing, at which point it became obvious. The desire for comedy also comes from the way that I established myself as a writer, which really happened through Manchester’s live literature scene. When I began to break through in the mid-2010s, there were live lit nights all over the city where I could grab a 4-minute open mic slot and try out bits of my life writing. I’d get up on stage, tell a story and, to make sure it engaged the audience, engineer a few comic beats. Essentially, I was doing open mic standup bits while hiding behind a Moleskine. That goes some way to explaining it. I got into writing to entertain people and have them feel something. Over time I refined this, tackling more complex ideas. Humor has become my default delivery system for the more challenging ideas. After one of my open mic readings, someone told me “you always bring me right to the brink of tears, then somehow save me with laughter” and I’ve never let go of that idea. 

I crave laughter in particular. During signings on my book tours, one of my favorite things to hear is that someone read one of my books in bed and laughed so much that it shook the mattress and woke their partner. There’s nothing quite like knowing your words are powerful enough to rattle beds across the nation.

BK: You write: “Grown-ups are the great forgetters. Between work, bills, and the varying bullshit that children are trying to tell them, they barely have enough time to eat before they fall asleep in front of the TV and everything starts all over again. So I wandered the countryside for twelve hours a day without them ever stopping to wonder if I’d been abducted or murdered.” Given that you were not the offspring of what are called helicopter parents, did you have a sense that you were, in a way, abandoned as a child? That you wanted more adult attention, less freedom?

AF: The freedom I write about in that part of the book was very much of the time and location, and it wasn’t peculiar to me. Mid-eighties Suffolk offered a very Stand By Me kind of childhood with a wild and open environment to disappear into. When we saw that movie, my friends and I all recognized our lives in it. The difference was that the kids in Stand By Me all seemed to be suffering some form of neglect. My friends and I were all loved and cared for as far as I could tell. We were just given a long leash. I suppose you could say we were free range. Perhaps feral. During those times when I headed out of the house alone though, it was much more about my need for space and distance rather than anything else. I was part of a large, noisy household and occasionally it’d become too much for me. The fact that I could just head out of the house and into the countryside, where I could climb a tall tree or go wading through a river was a gift. If anything, I abandoned my family rather than the other way around. The chapters/essays that bookend Broken Biscuits each look at that same escape impulse but during two different times of life; my childhood and my forties. That youthful freedom to disappear was liberating but looking back it makes me shudder. No one I know would now let their kids have the kind of childhood I enjoyed. The world is probably no scarier now than it was when I was a young, but we know more about it now. By 2025 standards, I could be seen as a neglected child, but it was never that way.

BK: In “The Beautiful Ones” chapter, you tell the reader that your brother Robert said, “You know that if I found out you were gay, I’d disown you,” and one of the book’s epigraphs from your father reads, “I just don’t know why you want to tell people all these personal things”? At that stage in your life was verbal intimacy with other males possible? 

AF: That essay focuses on my early teens, a time when I would never have dared discuss anything like that with other men or boys. I had a lot of behaviors and interests that saw me labeled as gay, and in a small rural town back in the eighties that made things particularly tough. My lack of inclination towards sports, my passionate interest in the music of Prince, my multiple platonic female friendships, all this was used by the people around me to question my sexuality. In time, I started to question it myself. I wondered if everyone else was right and they could see things in me that I couldn’t. As far as I was concerned, discussing it would have only made things worse. So, I just held it in until the point during my late thirties when I began writing about my life. Once I started doing that, articulating it, the dam broke. Everything came out. I went from being someone who wouldn’t openly discuss this stuff to being almost unable to stop. It was liberating and curative in that way. If I hadn’t discovered life writing, I think holding in those thoughts would have poisoned me. 

BK: Broken Biscuits is, in large part, a meditation on masculinity, arguably working-class masculinity. In “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” you question your masculinity in relation to survival skills. You write, “I’d likely be dead fifteen minutes into the end times.” What do you hope readers will learn from your conjuring of the end times?

AF: Through so much of Broken Biscuits, I compare myself to Robert, who, for many years, was my masculine ideal and I was desperate to emulate. That chapter is the final example of this comparison. Robert was a biker, a street fighter, and as much of a hunter as you’ll find in the UK. He was fearless. Never evaded combat. Felt alive in a fistfight. I could easily imagine him during the collapse of civilization fighting to the death over a can of expired kidney beans. I thought of him as the kind of man I could be if only I was tougher and better. In this part of the book, I’m really poking fun at myself for what I lack based on my definition back then of what a man was. I wanted to kick against that definition. We live in a time when standards of masculinity are being dictated to us by deeply problematic men whose notions of what a man should be are broadly bullshit. There is no typical man, no masculine standard that we should have to live up to. We’re told that men should be bold, resilient, strong, that they should be providers, but based on those standards, my mother is one of the toughest men on the planet. She’s also a great storyteller and, at 75, still works as a part-time burlesque dancer. If I’m trying to emulate anyone these days, it’s her.

BK: How did you decide on the 12-chapter, episodic structure for Broken Biscuits rather than, say, a single chronological narrative?

AF: It comes from years of working in the essay form. I started off blogging short personal essays that looked to explore ideas within a tight framework. Later, writing for the stage demanded the same concise thing. When I finally decided that I wanted to work on something longer form with my first book, Cold Fish Soup, I always knew it was going to be a memoir of linked essays. The craft then becomes about sequencing those essays, identifying and amplifying common themes that run through them and adding in callbacks. When Cold Fish Soup won an award, I felt like I was onto something so I stuck with the same format for Broken Biscuits. It’s the perfect form for me because it allows me to explore an idea in a focused way then move on to the next without taking up too much of a reader’s valuable time. All I’m asking of them is “Please give me your attention for a max of 10,000 words. If you don’t like it, maybe you’ll like the next one.” I always liken essay collections to the circus. You may not like the trapeze artist, but maybe you’ll like the clowns or the acrobats. I can’t envision a time when I’m going to ask a reader to suffer through 85,000 words of my clown act.

BK: In “An Inside Job,” your brother Ben goes to prison and tells you, “There are people you instinctively know not to mess with. You have to bite your tongue with certain things. But I know how to play people like that. I know to not push people too far.” This idea of limits haunts the chapter’s conclusion when you write, “I wanted to tell him that I loved him.” But you didn’t, you tell the reader, “because we’ve never been those kind of brothers and we’re not going to start now.” What prevents you, or the rest of us, from being “those kind of brothers”?

AF: I can’t speak for everyone, but for me it’s probably down to a lack of inclination to make myself truly vulnerable. Growing up, the times when I did allow myself to be like this were pounced upon as a weakness, so I learned to hide that side of me. Now I’m older, have lost a few people I was close to, and care less about how I’m perceived. I tell my friends I love them all the time. With my brothers though, it’s still taboo. I was too late with Robert, who took his own life in 2008. Through writing about him in my books though, I learned to better understand and love him. I regularly mention this at my book events, and appreciate having the opportunity to give voice to an idea that, were he around to hear me speak this way about him, he’d likely respond by putting me in a headlock until I apologized. I suspect he knew though. He certainly knew how much I admired him. But I’d have never come out and said it to him. Likewise, I would never tell Ben how much he means to me and how proud I am of him. He only knows I feel this way because I wrote an essay then sent it to him for editorial approval before publication. The last time I visited him at his restaurant, I learned that he’d shown the essay to all his colleagues. So, he knows I love him, his coworkers all know that I love him, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to say it to his face. Instead, I’ve placed myself in the absurd situation where I will tell my siblings that I love them, but only in writing that’s published globally.

BK: You’ve made numerous appearances connected to the publication of Broken Biscuits. What question hasn’t been asked yet that you wish had been?

AF: A lot of friends and reader reviews mentioned particularly enjoying “Exposures,” the chapter/essay that deals with my years running a photo lab, so I expected more questions about that. Maybe they were worried asking about it would appear too voyeuristic because it involves writing about the very private moments of strangers. I thought it could have brought up some interesting discussions about the morality of life writing, the act of making real people into characters and where one should draw a line. Questions about whether writing a story is worth the damage it could do. If it’s going to hurt someone, I’d say not. It’s the kind of thing that crops up a lot in my teaching and I think people who write in a memoir or creative nonfiction form should be doing their best to navigate it ethically. I can’t say I’ve always got it right, but it’s not through lack of trying.