since 1994, but it’s a work of memoir-like fact-fiction that few have really read. While it
was made into a stage play and a very funny movie in 2001, the film doesn’t approach the
level of charm, humor, and despair with which Birmingham treats his life in the novel.
Set in various cities around Australia’s coast in a period that spans more than a decade,
including the 80’s and early 90’s, the book is a cynical look at what people will endure to
have a cheap place to live.
Birmingham, a writer for Rolling Stone during the events of the book, chronicles
his years in the Aussie share housing circuit, a system similar to having roommates, but
involving far fewer trustworthy people. Like the roommate system, Aussie share housing
usually turns friends into enemies, girlfriends into ex’s going out with former best-
friends, and normal working citizens into freakish deviants battling for their share of the
property. Told as a memoir, but broken up with strange little boxes offering up roommate
stories, share house survival tips, and even detailed guides on must-have home items,
Birmingham may present the book as fiction, but within minutes of reading it, you can
begin to separate the truth from the exaggerations.
The book’s true charm doesn’t come from the characters, or even the method of
storytelling that the author employs, but rather it comes down to how relatable the book
is, even to those of us a generation behind Birmingham’s own, and half the world away.
As a college student, and then again in Grad School, I lived in the American version of
the shared housing program, and while it contained far fewer tea-sipping gangsters
coming to collect my rent, the odd situations and strange characters were very familiar.
It’s this connectivity that gives the book its charm, and the ability to see yourself as the
author himself (or as the narrator of one of the little side box tales of roommate horror)
that makes the book resonate as anything but fiction.
Just sit with the book and underline everything that seems familiar to you, I
guarantee it’ll look like you plan to do a thesis on the damn thing. Even if you just
underline the share house rules and required item pages, you’ll feel a comfortable
familiarity with Birmingham’s world. What dorm room, apartment, or crash-house didn’t
have the dreaded but also loved brown couch, site of a million episodes of Jeopardy and
only slightly fewer hook-ups? Who didn’t rely on milk crates (or some similar cheap or
free storage item) to double as a bookshelf, TV stand, or chair? In my old house, we used
a red Coleman cooler as the coffee table for almost a year, and we certainly had the two
other household staples that Birmingham relates, the fried fish finger, and the bucket
bong, known in these parts as a gravity bong.
When it comes own to it, He Died with a Felafel in His Hand is a hard book to
review, because it’s the kind of thing that entertains you as well as enlightens. It’s like
coming out of a really good movie, and then trying to explain it to your friends, you’ll do
your best, but all it comes down to is you babbling and making a lot of sound effects
while they look confused. The book is like that, if you like it, it’ll fire you up, get you
going, and make you look a little harder at the people in your life, but if you don’t like it,
then it’ll just seem like a loser telling a funny story about when he decided to get his life
together. But books are like that, they speak in a million different voices and tell a
million different stories, and like Birmingham himself proves in this book, one person’s
story might not always be the right one for you.
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