Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl by Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl Reviews

• 
  Emily

  Really loved this and am sad it's over. Particularly interesting having finished Just Kids recently, and the similarities between the struggle of the artist are quite obvious, but the tone of voice between smith and perry couldn't be more different. Perry's attitude is so open and unassuming, you fall in love with him. Smith keeps you at a haughty arms's distance. Perry's writing explaining his exhibition at the British Museum was my fave bit and got me onto this book.
• 
  Grace

  I read this a couple of years ago, but I remember really enjoying it. It's easy to read, Perry's writing voice is clear and simple, and the book is full of insightful looks into his world as an artist and a transvestite. I do plan to read this again when I have time :)
• 
  Lyn Lockwood

  Grayson Perry has had a remarkable life and his childhood was a series of screaming right turns by the adults around him alongside his growing need for cross dressing. A well told story in the company of a great artist. I look forward to reading more about his adult life.
• 
  Aqsa

  Grayson Perry: The Portriat of the Artist as a Young Girl was read in an effort to understand a wee bit more about the trans experience, but the book turned out to be so much more..
  
  Wildly funny and massively enlightening, the book details the life story from birth to age 22 of the pottery artist and cross-dresser (AND Tuner Prize winner) Grayson Perry right from his childhood in Essex to his early adulthood in seventies London. Written by his friend Wendy Jones, the book is primarily interviews of Perry telling her stories of how he came to be: his discovery of himself as an artist and as a transvestite.
  
  Perry has both an extremely gripping voice and is raucously funny, I have marked "!" and "LOL" all over, so he frames issues that as a cis-gendered woman who does not dabble in art, I had zero knowledge of, with such deep poignancy and intimacy that it feels like he is sitting over at your coach having a pint and just loafing on what had happened while you'd been away. You feel like you've missed out on a lot but he makes sure you have a good laugh about it nonetheless, and gets you his ceramics for company.
  
  I completed it in two sittings and bid him adieu for his next works.
• 
  Sally Campbell

  What I love about this book - and about Grayson Perry - is that it’s so full of honesty. Grayson isn’t afraid to show himself as vulnerable. I loved the fact that as an artist so renowned for his pottery he’s able to say ‘actually pottery might not be my thing, but it is now’. He shows that life changes us and we don’t need to constantly define ourselves. The book was an incredible insight into his early life and how it’s shaped him as a person.
• 
  Peter

  I really enjoyed this book. The tale of Grayson Perry - artist and cross-dressing potter - growing up in suburban Essex. His childhood and teenage story is pretty interesting and I often wished that the book had gone into more detail about parts of that, especially the feel of the places, but it gave great detail to the family characters. The book ended soon after his graduation from art school and I wish it had carried on a bit longer, taking us through the early years of his career as a working artist. I thought he was a character of quirky and opposing interests, dressing up, cross-dressing, mechanical repairs, pottery, imaginary worlds, S&M. It was interesting also to see connections with Boy George and Marilyn - he lived in some of the same squats as them in London. All in all it was a quick, easy read and I got through it in a day. It reminded me a little of Toast by Nigel Slater and he even used the same metaphor at one point - how love is making warm buttered toast for someone.
• 
  Hugh Donald

  fantastic read! a book that I will read over and over again.
• 
  Liselott

  I am not gonna go into details here, five stars means I liked it alot, and that I will read more of his.
• 
  🌶 peppersocks 🧦

  Reflections and lessons learned:
  “I’m not in love with my pots; I’m in love with the sensual beauty they can give.”
  
  An honest childhood analysis of conflict, upset and tears all charged with emotion and love delivered with a huge slab of practicality. A product of strong skilled male role models, a modern town in Chelmsford on the 70s and industrial times - the juxtaposition of two paragraphs from an Essex sugar beet factory work to art history summed up so much and made me smile with glee and recognition of a slightly later but similar setting from growing up - bike summers and tyre blowouts, dressing up, using libraries to find out more about so many things in life, gas fires, net curtains, china and brass ornaments, houses filled with pets, ball bearings to play with as toys brought home from factories - looking back maybe they weren’t such simple times after all but they made me happy…
  
  I recognised a lot of the places in Chelmsford as I’d lived and worked at the hospitals and had too found solace in the parks and open spaces at random times and hours. This book for me was not only an insight into a respected figure from the art world but also a recognition as to why I found so much comfort in living in Chelmsford in the similarity to the town where I grew up which I’d never seen before. Doesn’t everyone get propositioned on Moulsham Street?!
  
  “When people are looking at my work, I would like this book to sound as a hum in the background, the hum of my artistic engine. It is a portrait of the artist; it is what kind of man has made this kind of art”
  
  “It’s invariably awful being on the end of other people’s forgiveness”
  
  “Parents are a child’s survival. When I was a child, how could I countenance not thinking my parents were perfect? The alternative was too frightening to think of”
  
  “Even though Chelmsford was near London, it seemed very far away…”
  
  “Sex has been an inspiration to artists throughout the ages, Grayson, but it can get in the way”
  
  “This, for me, is the crux of why I’m an artist. It’s not in the detail of the picture; it is in the atmosphere of the world you enter. I haven’t taken being an artist seriously enough through my life”
  
  “I find it difficult to leave empty space, my instinct is to cover up emptiness and always elaborate, to my detriment sometimes. It’s part of my psychological make-up that I’m a detail freak”
• 
  Grace

  This was an interesting short read about one of my favourite artists! Grayson is extremely open which is very refreshing. However, I did find the beginning detailing Grayson's childhood a lot more interesting and easier to read than the second half which at times became a bit disjointed and all over the place, making it a bit difficult to follow.
  But, other than that it was a good read about a great artist. 😃
• 
  Tracy Schillemore

  An interesting look at the life of an artist in London during the punk era. It can be shocking at times.
• 
  tessie

  read for school
• 
  Kas Molenaar

  Ik ben verzot op Grayson Perry - nog meer dan ik al wist.
• 
  Simon Binning

  A memoir is a curious thing. Every one is written for a slightly different reason; to cash in on passing fame, to airbrush history, sometimes as a cathartic experience. For the reader, this means they can be a bit of a minefield. Some of my favourite reads have been memoirs; Alec Guinness, Alan Bennett and Alexei Sayle being delights in recent years. But some have been just awful, so I am careful in selecting them. Am I interested in the subject? Have they actually achieved anything worth writing about? Why have they written the book?
  Grayson Perry is an interesting subject; an artist whose public profile - both as Grayson and as Claire, his alter ego - is probably better known than his art. A profile that challenges people's perceptions of both the artist and the man. Whether that's what he set out to achieve is another matter, but he seems comfortable with himself. So I wondered how open he would be in recounting parts of his life.
  The book is written by Wendy Jones, based on many interviews and discussions with Perry, but written in his voice. In the wrong hands, this is a recipe for disaster, but it works beautifully here. The emotions of a young man struggling with his life, his loves, his art and his transvestism all come through strongly; often poetically. His early life was somewhat difficult; family affairs, difficult divorces; step-parents. Stability was lacking, and he developed a vivid imagination to give him comfort and security. At the centre was Alan Measles; a teddy bear, who became the focus of this realm. He used what he had to hand to build everything needed to populate his world, and lost himself in it. His description of these times is touching; of the hopes and fears of childhood; of learning about friendship and family; of burgeoning sensual feelings, with little or no understanding of what they meant.
  His interest in female clothing, and his understanding of what lies behind it for him develop as he grows up, and it is a fascinating read. It is a gradual process, broken up by his own fears and doubts, and also by the intervention of others when he is discovered. He explains his own motivations and rewards; his relief at the acceptance of others. And gives those of us with little knowledge a few lessons in the etiquette of cross-dressing.
  The story of his artistic development is fascinating too. Now known to the public primarily as a potter, he was a late developer in this area. Always interested in making things, he went through various stages, first as a creative child, then at art college, and although he had had pottery lessons from an early age, it was only as an adult that he found a teacher who inspired his love for traditional potting and ceramic techniques which he uses today. His stories about his college years will be familiar to most students; particularly those of around his generation. The stories of ventures into performance art, and a brief period of drug use are poignant and sometimes very funny.
  He is able to look back now and explain his development in both areas, whilst readily admitting that he didn't understand them at all at the time. He wryly subjects his younger self to some severe criticism, acknowledging that he lost his way several times. But it is these meanderings which produced the artist he is now. Artists don't emerge fully formed; at least, not very often. They need to form, develop, grow. Move from the derivative to the original. And I really got that from this book. He shows us his early need to please; parents; teachers; contemporaries. And then his acceptance of himself; to do what he wants to do, and to be what he wants to be.
  The book is one of the best descriptions of what it means to be an artist I've read. In many ways, it's not anything magical; talent yes, but dedication, experimentation and perseverance are just as important. He's not afraid to analyse his talent and creativity; to acknowledge his weaknesses as well as his strengths. The different facets of his character work together to make him the artist and man we see today, and very likeable he is. The story tails off a bit towards the end, with less detail as it approached the present day (it was written in 2007), but this doesn't diminish it. It's definitely worth a read.
• 
  Christine Busuttil

  I was a bit disappointed with this really, but then maybe getting to form an opinion of someone by their TV persona was part of my problem.
  However this is a lesson for me ,everyone likes different aspects of people's personalities for different reasons
  I like the way he can draw out the essence of people in interview and through his art.
  
  This book however was more about how important dressing up is to Grayson and how he really experimented with his art when younger.
  Much prefer him now!
  I also think I missed out on the lovely pics of his earlier art work by getting the kindle version.
• 
  Barbara

  When seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong wrote about his recovery from testicular cancer, he called the book 'It's Not About the Bike'. Perry could equally have called this book 'It's Not About the Pots' and it's a shame, because unlike those looking for something more sensationalist, I wanted a book about the pots.
  
  In 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl', Perry has shared his childhood and youth up to the age of 22 with his friend, writer Wendy Jones. Yes, there's a joke in the title with its pun on James Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' that won't be lost on many of the readers. However, lest you expect something heavy going, the cover photo of Perry dressed as his alter-ego 'Claire' riding on a tricycle soon tips you off that this isn't the tale of his work or his professional success, it's the story of how his childhood influenced the man and the artist that he became. It's crying out for a sequel or sequels since the book takes us only as far as his discovery of ceramics and it stops a long way before he established himself in his field.
  
  Perry was born in 1960 to a rather dull father and a mother who found her amusements outside her marriage if you know what I mean. You can't expect even the dullest father to not mind when your mum gets knocked up by the milkman so divorce followed and young Grayson was caught between a mother and step-father who were rather too tied up in themselves and a father who moved on to start a new life and a new marriage. He sought solace in his teddy bear, the oddly named Alan Measles, with whom Perry started to act out bizarre and complex fantasies which over time became (no other way to put this) a bit kinky. He started to experiment with auto-eroticism in the form of strangulation and wrapping himself tightly in sheets and clothes. He discovered the thrill of Crimplene (I kid you not) and the buzz he got from women's clothing, dressing in his mother's clothes and finding himself excitedly aroused. All this evolved to become a more and more integral part of who young Perry saw himself to be. He started to buy women's clothes, went looking for places to get changed into or out of his clothes and he tangled with the thorny issue of which toilet to go into if you're planning to dress up whilst you're in there (do you go into the ladies dressed as a man or come out of the gents dressed as a lady?)
  
  The chapters when Perry is away at art school were some of the ones I found most enjoyable. His open-minded girlfriend and her friends gave him the space to be as wild and crazy as he no doubt needed to be. They took a lot of drugs and worked as little as they could get away with and in this part of the book we start to learn about how he developed as an artist. At last after wading through chapter after chapter of frock-fetishism, I was getting to the meat of the bits I wanted to know more about. Sadly, they were a very small part of the overall book.
  
  The great thing about this book is the honesty and the openness that's expressed on every page. Too many biographies and autobiographies restrict themselves to only telling the reader the 'nice bits' or the bits that make the subject of the book look good. Not too many people would jump in both feet first like Perry has and tell you EVERYTHING, regardless of how it reflects on him and how much it might shock his reader. He comes across as warm, funny, honest and likeable, even whilst the things he's telling you are maybe wriggling into your mind like dirty little worms of discomfort.
  
  When you have an artist whose work is so tied up in his own history and emotions, it's a fair proposition to create a book about what made him what he is. His pots and his paintings are filled with images of rejection, abuse, mutilation, violence and juvenile sexuality (and LOTS of penises) so it's natural to want to give some background to why someone feels the need to express himself through such images. The problem is that at times the art gets lost behind the history. The pottery takes second place to Grayson Perry's greatest artistic products - himself and his alter-ego Claire. It's so excessively 'not about the pots' that my inner voice was crying out "Sod the frocks, tell us how you learned to apply colour, how you worked with glazes, how many pots you exploded before you learned to do it right".
  
  I have nothing against transvestites and if someone told me they liked to cross dress it really wouldn't bother me in the slightest but if they wanted to talk about the erotic frisson of touching fabrics, I'm probably going to squirm in my chair and try to change the subject. Transvestism is a bit like the Large Hadron Collider; I'm happy enough to know they're doing it, but I really don't need to know all the details of how and why. I take the policy of 'each to their own' and 'live and let live' and I hope I'd never be the type to snigger over anyone trying to find their place in society by cross-dressing. I'd rather see a bloke in a dress than a teen-aged boy with his jeans halfway to his knees showing off his boxers - at least the transvestite looks like she's taken care with her appearance (I think I just sounded like my mother for a moment there). However, what this book made me realise was that whilst I don't mind how anyone chooses to dress and express themselves, I don't always want to read about it. If Perry wants to dress as a young girl, that's fine but if he wants to tell me all about the sexual arousal of touching and wearing women's clothing, I'm not quite so comfortable reading that. Especially when what I bought the book for was to learn about his art.
  
  It's really hard to say whether I'd recommend this book. I didn't like it but even so I would probably buy a sequel if and when it becomes available, in the hope that we'd finally get around to learning about the pots. I'm still not sure who this book is supposed to target. I suspect it's for those who already love the man, think he's a genius and would buy his shopping lists if they were published. As someone who's interested in art in general and pottery more specifically, it's not my cup of tea. If you want a book to tell you about what Grayson Perry does, then this is not it. If you want an insight into the way his mind works, it might be. And If you're looking for a bit of titillation and a kinky read about child sexuality then sorry for my judgemental approach but please go see a therapist.
  
• 
  Simon Fletcher

  An interesting and frank biography of one of the UKs leading contemporary artists.
• 
  Esther

  What a super human being. This is his autobiography from birth until mid 20s. Utterly fascinating, charming, self deprecating. His childhood had some terrible and distant parents and step parents. Forays into transvestism in 70s rural Essex, were at turns funny and touching to read. His escape to art college and London squats brought him out, on many levels. Again I think reading this, here is someone from a poor working class background, shit parents offering no support and his talent gets him into art college and a full grant from the government enables him to go off become independent and develop his talent. What do these kinds of kids do now?
• 
  Steve Roberts

  I'm a big fan of Grayson Perry so was interested to read about his early life and influences. This autobiography is a searingly honest account of his troubled upbringing and struggle with becoming both an artist and transvestite. I think most people will identify with his teenage angst and finding an outlet through student excess. Of course not many of us end up as Turner prize winning artists later!
  
• 
  Vermillion

  Inspiring, encouraging for aspiring artists, honest, shocking in its depiction of childhood neglect and physical abuse, but ultimately uplifting and hopeful. I will read this book again, especially the second half which has lots of great advice for aspiring artists.
• 
  Sarah

  There is oodles of humanity in this book (and a mention of a Crispy Ambulance).
• 
  Isabella

  The book is a good read for anyone who’s likes artists biographies, but it was as interesting as it was unsatisfactory. Grayson Perry is an incredible man with a fascinating story and “Portrait of the artist as a young girl” is a good overview of his life, but such a good story could have been presented better if written differently. Throughout the whole book it’s really easy to see how it was structured based on a series of interviews; some sentences sound like a literal transcription of voice-narrated story, and on paper, they’re just plain bad.
  
  Another disappointing factor was how one of the focal points of Grayson’s personal life and practice, transvestitism, was explained through the artist’s words up till a certain point, and then completely left out. I was curious to find how Claire, the artist’s feminine side, was first born and then turned into a definite alter ego. After introducing the story in the first few chapters; talking about how Grayson started to cross-dress and the reasoning behind it, it was kind of just left aside. In these chapter the artist keeps referencing to Claire, leaving you impatient to know more about it, as he talks about how, at first, her identity wasn’t set into a specific persona as he was just generically dressing as a woman. When did Greyson’s feminine side incarnate in Claire? When, how did she get a name? What is the rest of the story? The book doesn’t answer these questions, as it ends abruptly before the formal birth of Claire.
  
  My first thought as I turned the last page was, is this it? The story ends in a strage, unstable timeframe in the artist life, as he was living in London, after graduating from University; he had just started working on pottery but wasn’t successful yet, still living in a squalid squat with no money. The book feels incomplete, and as much as I enjoyed reading Grayson’s story, I can’t help but think that it’s a shame that it was translated onto paper in this way.
• 
  Kimmy

  This was an utter delight to read, and I thank my friend Basha Harris for mailing it to me as a surprise. Part English charm Roald Dahl, part Brit Punk, part Rocky Horror drama and cross-dressing, this is an artist's biography that shows the artist's charm, wit and life story shining as brightly as his work. Drug trips, divorce, squat living, imagination galore. Highly recommended for readers who enjoyed Just Kids by Patti Smith, love a good punk tale, are aspiring artists or who are already fans of Grayson Perry's by-his-own-rules art.
  
  "I'd cycled to the National Gallery to see a painting of Chatterton lying on his deathbed and decided, ' I want a shirt like that,' so my apparel became a flowing white shirt, leather waistcoat, leather jodhpurs, riding boots and blowzy hair. I wore that outfit every day in the second year. I probably stank."
• 
  Aileen

  A very enjoyable account of this artist’s early years. I only really took note of him after an exhibition of his work at my local gallery, I found his work quirky and interesting, and bought this book from the gallery shop afterwards in order to learn more.
  
  His childhood years were really quite sad, his parents divorced, he hated his stepfather, and didn’t often see his father. He grew more eccentric and the cross-dressing began to take shape. At college and after, he lived in squats, developing his alter ego Claire, but it was when he took an evening class in pottery that his love of ceramics took off. Less than 200 pages and interspersed with lots of photos, I found this a quick and informative read.
• 
  Patrick Dale

  A good, quick and interesting read. For me, it's a book that does its job and nothing more- which is perfcly fine. It details well Grayson Perry's early life with some abuse and journies through to his first successes of an artist. The book does really well in getting across his transformation in thoughts and ideas that build him into the artist he is today. And of course it's very interesting to read about his slow journey into being a transvestite, from sneaking clothes from his mom to accepting the Turner Prize dressed as Claire, his alter-ego. Probably a good recommendation for budding artists.
• 
  Gavin Hogg

  This takes you through Grayson's life right up to the moment he started getting some acclaim. He remembers so many little details and the descriptions of his chaotic family life are harrowing and humorous. His early experiences dressing as a woman are the same - like the time he's hiding from some people in a bush when their dog discovers him.
  I enjoyed the same sense of warmth and humanity you get when you see him on TV. His Art Club programme during lockdown was one of the highlights of the year. There don't seem to be as many eccentrics in the media these days so I'm always pleased when he pops up somewhere.