Like sitting in a room with Mark and hearing the best stories in the world, wound up with wisdom, craft, and hard-won philosophy

A brilliantly engaging storyteller, laugh-out-loud funny, loving, cheekily smug . . . An enjoyable read on making, inventing and what might contribute to a life worth living

Mark is an amazing polymath - and an Olympic-level aesthete. Unlike many polymaths and aesthetes, though, when he gets up in the morning, it's to make real, physical things - including this book

On a job site Mark makes irreverent banter while scribbling measurements on the back of pizza box as works of astonishing complexity and precision materializes under his direction. Now he has somehow applied this same deceptively offhand but exacting craft to unspooling this collection of tales from his ascent to the summit of one of the most demanding construction habitats on earth

Wry, laconic and packed with salient life lessons, this is a book that will encourage everyone to attempt to build the life they wish to live

Who knew Mark Ellison’s handiwork would include a book this exquisite, purposeful, absorbing? How To Build Impossible Things merits reading and rereading — it’s a book with much to teach us all.

Mark Ellison is known for building beautiful rooms, but here he has crafted a gorgeous book. This cross between Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Kitchen Confidential contains fascinating insights about working with your hands, the nature of talent, and how to create a meaningful life, whatever your craft is. Oh, and lots of juicy stories of pain-in-the-ass clients. Even if you aren’t handy — I can barely hang a picture frame — you’ll find this book a wonderful read

Beguiling… Self-Portrait illuminates how supremely difficult it is to make an artistic practice work alongside the demands of care-giving and home-making… The author draws on the rare reflective power she exhibits in her art, to communicate what, she found, painting could not.

Compelling... The story she relates through images and words has the feel of a painter’s parable, in which hardship, sacrifice and solitude lead, eventually, to something like grace... Paul is uninterested in making herself appear more palatable for the benefit of a reader. She accounts for her life like a person peeling off her bandages, often asking her audience to share in her experiences of difficulty and hurt.

Fascinating... Paul's paintings, interspersed throughout the book, are quite extraordinary - ambiguous and mystical... Her style is passionate [and] direct.

An impressive portrait of the artist as a young woman...candid, non-judgemental and illuminating.

Engrossing.

[An] insightful, unflinchingly honest account, she [Celia Paul] describes her need for space to work and think, her emotionally tempestuous 10-year relationship with Lucian Freud.

Beautifully written, and thoughtful

A deeply affecting and lyrical self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, which quietly builds in strength and luminosity, culminating in a glorious state of serenity and self-knowledge.

An insight into the white knuckle determination needed to make great art, and why it is so few women painters reach the heights. An astoundingly honest book, moving and engrossing – full of truths.

Self-Portrait demonstrates a painter’s startling command of language and her moral power of seeing the world concretely and without subjectivity. Celia Paul’s account of the young woman artist’s struggle towards expression is a story that exposes some of the deepest wounds in our cultural psyche: the ambiguous power of the male artist, the vulnerability and isolation of the woman driven to create, the question of who owns her, of her very body and what it’s for. Written with beauty and candour but without anger, Self-Portrait will yet arouse indignation in its readers, for its delicate exposure of what occurs in the pursuit and misuse of artistic status.

Self-Portrait by Celia Paul is a valuable document. The precision and intimacy of her writing is as impressive as the empathy and power of her painting. I feel that this book will be important to many readers.

A wonderfully honest and thoughtful book, unburdened by anger or blame or the need to justify, even though it is conjuring up the presence of such a difficult and complicated man. The words make pictures in my head, just as the pictures make words.

I loved Celia Paul’s memoir. It reminded me what it felt like to be a very young painter – and also just very young.

I have been reading the wonderful autobiography Self-Portrait by Celia Paul, which recounts her early life as an artist and her relationship with Lucian Freud, with whom she spent ten years and had a son.

Celia’s writing, like her painting, is unflinchingly honest and utterly heart wrenching. This book charts how as an artist and a young woman, with the sensitivity of a butterfly and the ferocity of a lion, Celia Paul makes her way through these enthralling and bewildering formative years.

A depiction of difficult relationships between artists—fruitful and terrifying… [Self-Portrait] is important and necessary.

It’s a haunting companion piece to William Weaver’s recent rumbustious biography of Lucian Freud, Paul’s former lover. Freud’s personal life made Picasso’s seem a Victorian model of temperance and it’s interesting to reflect on the slack cut for great artists, so long as they were men.

Paul's memoir, Self-Portrait, is to me among the greatest ever books by an artist.

[A] truly fascinating story

An entertaining collection.

Pretty impressive.

Sensitive, often witty and sometimes melancholic reflections.

Unveil[s] the inventive mind behind his regular-guy façade.

Perfect for book lovers and cinephiles alike.

A pretty damn good writer.

Full of Hanks' winning charm.

Hanks’ measured storytelling makes the collection an addictive read.

Startlingly good… A spellbinding easygoing read, it is hard to find any fault, other than that Hanks is annoyingly talented and yet still somehow remains impossible to dislike.

Startlingly good … each of these 17 stories leap out from the page in their authenticity and whimsicality … A spellbindingly easygoing read, it is hard to find fault.

A wonderful collection.

Warm, gently funny and mostly engaging.

Behind the collection is a warmth and humanity.

Unexpectedly brilliant.

A spellbindingly easygoing read, it is hard to find fault.

Rich range of subject matter and emotions.