A finely crafted, wonderfully observed reminiscence on an extraordinary, often traumatic life

An affectionate, no-punches-pulled, often hilarious memoir

Both charming and combative

As soon as I read the opening I was determined and eager to consume everything that followed, up to and including the Pot Roast

Heller's domestic side is evoked with painful detail by his daughter, Erica, in her well written, occasionally harrowing memoir, Yossarian Slept Here

A likeable memoir...Yossarian Slept Here gives us the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friend's cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them

Erica Heller...seems to have weathered her girlhood better than most daughters of celebrated literary lions... Heller's book shows a robust acceptance of her father's overbearing personality and Don Draperesque approach to marriage and fatherhood... The New York of the period leaps off the page

With wit punctuating lambent nostalgia, Erica Heller brings her father to life in an animated, absorbing fashion, documenting his quirky habits, celebrity, and "invisible, unfathomable inner cycle," but also her parents' divorce and Heller's suffering with Guillain-Barre syndrome. The total effect is akin to leafing through a bulging family scrapbook where one finds a few blurry images among many snapshots in sharp focus. Erica Heller has inherited her father's finely tuned flair with words

Intimate, yet well-researched..comedic and poignant, her many-faceted memoir is rendered in high-definition as Heller recounts meals, travels, parties, arguments, lies, and the serious illnesses that afflicted her and her parents. Writing with wit, compassion, aplomb, and no little wonder at what her father wrought and her mother endured and how this legacy shaped her, Heller presents an involving and invaluable work of personal and cultural history.

Heller's family memoir brims with warm reflections right from the opening chapters... An affectionate family scrapbook crafted with a bittersweet blend of humor and pathos

Erica Heller to me is like a Carrie Fisher on the East Coast. She is as authentic as they come

Erica Heller has a story to tell and I for one am eager to see it in print. I think this is going to be one hell(er) of a memoir

The New York of the period leaps off the page

Heller's domestic side is evoked with painful detail by his daughter, Erica, in her well written, occasionally harrowing memoir, Yossarian Slept Here

Likeable memoir...just as Daugherty is blind to the limitations of Heller's work so he appears resistant to personal criticism of Heller or rebuke. Just One Catch is no hagiography but, of these two biographical accounts on Yossarian Slept Here gives us the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friend's cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them

Boasts everything that she does best: courage, ferocity and prose that soars

In memoir, honesty matters more than anything but, when married with humour, wit and elan vital of Jeanette Winterson's [book], it is a transformative force

The specifics of her early abuse is vivid, violent, and no less horrifying for its familiarity... If the memoir was begun as a final exorcism of the monster mother, it ends with a moving acceptance of her

Moved me deeply. [It] celebrates the redeeming power of the written word and is undercut with an irresistible humour born of residence in hardship

An extraordinary tragic-comic literary autobiography

There is something darkly Dickensian in the urgency and energy of her character and quest, in the acute, abrupt style of her self-presentation and in the extreme characters who have informed her life

Funny and scary mixed together, in the manner of the Brothers Grimm, sharp as a knife, round as a child's eye

Difficult, spirited, engaging... a resonant affirmation of the power of storytelling to make things better

Moving, turbulent

Shattering, brilliant memoir... Here childhood eas ghastly, as bad as Dickens's stint in the blacking factory, but it was also the crucible for her incendiary talent

Verbalyl dazzling, emotionally searing, compassionate and often hilarious memoir

Jeanette Winterson's new memoir appears to have been highly praised, rightly it seems to me, for its zest and candour and noted for a quality that some reviewers have seen as haste or even carelessness but which I see as her characteristic lively, pugnacious inventiveness.

The prose is breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once. She defines the pursuit of happiness not as being content (which is "fleeting" and "a bit bovine"), but as the impulse to "swim upstream", the search for a meaningful life. This breathless, powerful book is that search.

Winterson is a bold author with a track record of writing imaginative transformation tales, and this is a work about the power of words, stories and books to give identity to a life that is in turns shocking, funny, warm and wise.

Engaging memoir.

There clear-eyed, drily witty, searingly moving memoir.

It does all that committed fans might hope... This is far funnier than the novel that made Winterson’s name... Brilliant book.

An inspirational memoir written in beautiful exact prose that celebrates the wildness of the ordinary. Winterson’s understanding of who she is… is both appallingly funny and deeply moving. Essential reading for anyone with a snitch of an interest in writing

Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? burrowed deep and made me laugh and weep. This memoir has a great warmth and an intensity and honesty that is rare and the writing is exceptional

Winterson’s unconventional and winning memoir wrings humor from adversity as it describes her upbringing by a wildly deranged mother

It is in laying the truth bare in this unflinchingly honest and gripping memoir that Winterson really seems to find self-acceptance, love and even happiness