‘That Boy Of Yours Wants Looking At’
is about love, loss, adversity and acceptance.
As the youngest of six children born in a tough working-class area, and consumed by an obsessive desire for music and literature, Simon Smalley has led an unconventional life. Wholeheartedly encouraged by his parents and two elder sisters, from an early age he read voraciously and wrote with matching zeal.
Regrettably, an uninspiring secondary modern comprehensive school education was far from stimulating. Unthwarted, Simon created punk rock fanzines when he was fifteen, and later, during a career in music retail, he accepted an invitation to write monthly reviews for the gay periodical Outright! This position evolved into Simon reporting on more diverse subjects, and the progression to become co-publisher.
Empowered by his contribution to an LGBT anthology, for two-and-a-half years Simon devoted himself to writing his first volume of memoir. ‘That Boy Of Yours Wants Looking At’ is about love, loss, adversity, and acceptance. At its core is a child with a wild imagination and a desire for glamour trying to survive being gay and disabled on a Nottingham council estate in the sixties and seventies.
Simon Smalley takes us on a humorous, riotously colourful, and heart-rending journey through cataclysmic bereavement and being raised by his World War 2 RAF dad who encouraged his boy to be his true self.
Simon’s tale of self-expression through music and his battle with his body, self-esteem, and equally crippling paranoia is also a poignant account of what it takes to live authentically.
From Simon’s disastrous experiment with polystyrene platform shoes to his unerring love of punk rock; from his daily battles with school bullies to making peacock-colour eyeshadow with his dad, this memoir will take you on an emotional journey that will leave you breathless, teary-eyed, and desperate to meet Simon and his uniquely brave father. It is an exceptional story of love, confusion, heartache, and, ultimately, the joy of being true to yourself no matter the odds.
Finally fulfilled with being a published author, Simon began his second volume of memoirs. Following another two-and-a-half years of fingertip-blistering writing, it will be published on 1 November 2024.
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