Volume LIV Number 3
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Books
On the Booze
My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey, by Ross Fitzgerald; New South, 2010, 240 pages, $34.95.
“The truth is that, quite often, a little bit of me goes a long way,” Ross Fitzgerald writes towards the end of My Name is Ross. It is a characteristically disarming observation. Fortunately he stopped drinking forty years ago. But this account of his years of drinking and pill-popping nonetheless fills a substantial volume. And a harrowing account it is. But, again characteristically, it is relieved with wit and verve.
The temptation, and Fitzgerald is clearly not one readily to refuse temptation, must have been to present this as a latter-day rake’s progress, a jolly saga of men behaving badly. “Such a lark! Stole two boots and a brass hat. Hung a notice of a bal masqué on the railing of a Baptist chapel, and stuck a board with ‘Mangling done here’ on the Hospital gate,” as Dudley Smooth put it in a piece by Marcus Clarke in the 1860s. “Ho, for the breakage of lamps, the carrying away of signs, the petty larceny of gilt hats and wooden boots!”
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