film freak

When I began my first memoir, ‘Paperboy’, about craving books and growing up in a home without them, I faced a problem. I had kept notebooks filled with fiction but never wrote down what actually happened within our family. The reason is clear to me now; I felt more comfortable inside a fantastical world than […]

I’ve been granted leave of absence by my doctors so I’m off to Madrid for the weekend to see my oldest friend, who has been restricted for a very long time by one of the toughest lockdowns in the world. The thought of fresh sights thrills me to the core. As much as I love […]

In a time of fake news, the story couldn’t be more timely. In America, an article written for a magazine spawned a play and an essay about the negotiability of facts in non-fiction. In 2003 John D’Agata, a writer from the American school of factual overload had an essay spiked for inaccuracies. The piece ostensibly […]

That’s what a publisher told me, paraphrasing the experimental author BS Johnson, who used that as the title of his own memoir – so how come I ended up writing two volumes of them? What happened was this. I’d been thinking of writing about growing up in a house virtually without books, in the style […]

  There were two separate editions of ‘Film Freak’. The paperback version corrected a couple of minor errors and added another chapter that had needed to be cleared for publication, leading to slightly different versions of the same book. I had wanted to explain more about the rising fear of home video influencing young minds […]

 Forgive the plugs this week, but you can always skip this post. The updated Film Freak paperback has got off to a flying start and here’s what the critics have to say about it so far… ‘Film Freak is a homage to pre-digital cinema, an elegy for the vanishing London of almost half a century […]

  The cover is soft and silky, the innards have a new extra libel-cleared chapter – and the paperback is out now! In fact, I’m reading extracts from it all over town at the moment. What started out as a labour of love turned into something oddly different, and I’m thrilled that it’s doing so […]

The excellent Tim Haigh interviewed me for his podcast recently about my experiences in the wonderful/horrible world of British film in the 1970s and 1980s – he’s a really thorough researcher, and always manages to ask the questions other interviewers miss out. It’s a great way for a writer to remember the other stories he […]

The first review is in and it’s a stonker – here. (The computer auto-corrected that to ‘stinker’. Everyone’s a critic.) ‘was so smitten with this book that I read it through from cover to cover in one sitting,’ says the reviewer. That’s better than a poke in the eye.

This early review just appeared in Shots magazine, courtesy of Mike Ripley, so perhaps you’ll excuse me on this occasion for running it. Sometimes when you’re writing a book, you have little idea whether it’s any good, and it’s great to get feedback. ‘Christopher Fowler’s Film Freak is the confessions of a film nut determined to get […]