I think the fair response to this is that it's very much the book we'd expect – well-written and enjoyable, anecdotal, and very right-on about being a young gay man in a fairly spunkless suburb of London. It turns out from what he says of his early comedy routines that life-long Tom Allen fans would have heard some of these stories, either from his sets or chat show appearances since – and there was a lot that was familiar about the 'dislodging from the water-slide' scene. But extended anecdotes, such as him gearing up to a luncheon party to get into the boxers of his intended first love, even though the lad concerned was straight, are still going to be good ways to pass the time. The narrative is of the young Tom, crippled with self doubt and seemingly self-destructing insistence on being off-kilter and not one of the quote/unquote "normal" people, slowly rising to fame and acceptance through the medium of being a sartorial stand-up. A detailed chapter regarding a booking on a gay men's Mediterranean cruise break, where he at last found an ease in bringing some of the heads-up, speaking-to-more-than-one-person aspect of his performance to real social life, seems to put a lot of the praise for that on the Americans on board. Well, the American audience would lap a book like this up, and it would join the thousands from people you've never heard of who have three Netflix titles to their name already, and nothing better to do than put their "I grew up with this about me that was unusual so you better bloody like me" shtick across 300pp. This is superior for being better than that, more natural-seeming, more honest and much less unpleasantly self-congratulating and overly self-aware. Plus it's refreshing to have an entry to this genre with British frames of reference – just the mention of the areas of the school left for you to abandon your rucksacks at lunch brought back floods of images.