A touching, searching, and warm memoir of troubles with masculinity
Adam Farrer | Broken Biscuits: And Other Male Failures | Harper North: £16.99
Reviewed by Joseph Hunter
Anyone reading this, no matter their gender, will know that complaining about how hard it is to be a man is not a highly-commended activity. In fact, most men learn from a young age not to do so – the adage ‘boys don’t cry’ still holds true for many. But it’s worth remembering that patriarchy is, among other things, elitist. Most men are not the elite, by definition. Masculinity, likewise, can be a hard taskmaster. It’s difficult for many boys even to figure out what it is they’re supposed to be among all the things they are supposed not to be. And it makes many of them bitter, when they aren’t too busy being angry.
Adam Farrer’s Broken Biscuits is not a bitter book. It’s not an angry book, either, although there is plenty of pain and injustice in it. It’s warm, funny, and generous, and – as the subtitle And Other Male Failures suggests – it’s often about Farrer failing to live up to various aspects of masculinity. The twelve essay-chapters that comprise this episodic memoir span Farrer’s life and cover issues as diverse as homophobia, bullying, body image, sexual insecurity, consent, fraught family dynamics, and fatherhood. It follows his 2022 debut memoir Cold Fish Soup, which hinged around his seaside town home of Withernsea, Yorkshire, and won a NorthBound Book Award. His success as a writer coming in middle age, Farrer is able to draw on a measured and hard-won appreciation for life’s tidal contours. He writes as one both eroded and enriched by the passing of time, arriving at self-understanding and forgiveness.
Not that he has very much to forgive himself for. Broken Biscuits contains violence and cruelty, but it is almost always aimed at Farrer from without. Several of the essays deal with his relationship with his homophobic brawler of an older brother, Rob. In ‘The Beautiful Ones’, Farrer tells of being in a pub with Rob as a young teenager and being informed that he will be disowned if he turns out to be gay. Farrer is concerned, not just at his brother’s pronouncement but because the suspicion that he might be gay is shared by others, namely his classmates. It’s particularly perturbing for the young Farrer, because:
I was straight. This I knew with absolute certainty. I did like girls. But then, if everyone was so keen to tell me otherwise, maybe they recognised something about me I didn’t?
Being straight, like so many aspects of masculinity, is only partially about who you are attracted to. Accusing him of being gay, for his brother Rob and those at his school who also suspect him, is a catch-all for various ways in which he fails to fit the mould of masculinity that they have been conditioned to approve of. In this essay, this (non) conformity is channelled through music. Rob is later horrified by Farrer’s interest in the sensual aesthetics (and music) of Prince, and even goes so far as to ‘test’ his younger brother by planting his girlfriend’s sister in the boy’s bedroom.
Some of the book’s most remarkable passages concern sex, and sexual anxiety. The book’s titular essay is an account of his penis woes. A medically-necessary circumcision in his 40s is followed by a problematic and anxiety-inducing recovery where his ability to achieve and maintain erections is compromised. The experience leads him onto forums and reddit threads where he encounters a wailing chorus of similarly-afflicted men:
Everywhere I looked, I found guys in toxic relationships with their own genitalia, and I was no exception. We were the saddest of oxymorons; a solitary collective, each of us plaintively wandering the forums alone and wailing for answers[.]
Fortunately for Farrer, and with the help of an understanding partner, he is able to recover both sexual function and a certain degree of perspective. He and his penis are not, after all, synonymous. In the process he realises that ‘no one, in fact, spends more time thinking about penises than those who possess them’. Still, there are no easy fixes. As Farrer writes, ‘fragile masculinity is a billion-dollar industry’, and he finds himself throwing money at the problem.
‘Bonnie Black Hare’, conversely, deals with different kinds of sexual pressure. It contains two accounts of sexual encounters in which Farrer’s consent was ambiguous at best. This is a difficult topic and one that he handles with great delicacy and nuance, and with an acknowledgment that many of his female friends have experienced much more upsetting versions of similar situations. But it’s to his great credit that he is vulnerable and open enough to tackle such a subject, and to do so with a generous mind willing to see such situations from all angles. It’s not an easy read, but the book is the better for it.
The cover of this beautiful book features an image of a semi-naked male figurine. It’s headless, so the focus is all on the physique. That physique is both familiar and eerie – an exaggerated rendering of male musculature so familiar that it’s easy to forget how few men actually look like that. This is something Farrer acknowledges in ‘A Picture of Health’, the penultimate essay-chapter of the collection: ‘no one around me looked like my action figures because these were physiques drawn from fiction.’ Like most men, this is a truth I recognise. It’s what my Action Man dolls looked like when I played with them as a young boy and succumbed to the urge to undress them. It’s what steroid-injecting wrestlers and movie stars look like. A plastic image, of constructed masculinity. As such, it’s a very fitting cover image. In these essays, Farrer unpicks the way that his own masculinity has been made. Sometime forced on him from the outside, sometimes badly wrought by him from the inside, and always constructed. There’s little that’s natural or ‘normal’ about masculinity. Farrer finds the absurd among the pain and the warmth among the failure. He may feel he’s sometimes failed as a man, but this book is a success.
Reviewed by Joseph Hunter