It’s a state of morbid petulance and persecution, of sensational narcissism and wild emotions keenly felt, of Eros and Thanatos fumbling eternally in the backseat. Whether as the sneering wraith twirling gladioli during the Smiths’ first appearance on Top of the Pops in 1983 or in his beefed-up, rockabilly-mechanic guise of today, Morrissey, now 54, has held fast to the mindset of late-20th-century pop music’s great object and subject: the existentially bewildered adolescent. If the reports are true that he held Penguin to ransom over the Classics imprimatur and won, then ‘Autobiography’ is an act of hubris at once appalling, hilarious and diabolically brilliant, much like the writer himself. What links other Penguin Classics authors is death and veneration Morrissey has always longed for both, first as lead singer of the Smiths – the greatest band to emerge from the extraordinary British postpunk renaissance of the 1980s – and then in his resilient solo career.

In fact, the British pop icon’s memoir was merely delayed, reportedly over his insistence on a Penguin Classics designation – a black-border badge of literary immortality assigned, in this exceptional case, before the book’s actual birth, which is rather a royalist attitude for someone who once made a great record called ‘The Queen Is Dead.’ As recently as September, the Atlantic put together a convincing case that its imminent publication was a hoax. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Morrissey’s ‘Autobiography,’ which Penguin published in Britain and the rest of Europe last week, is that it exists at all.

Autobiography by morrissey