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1 November 2016

Seventeen uses of the word “sick”, too many semi-colons: analysing Zayn Malik’s autobiography

The formality and reticence of Zayn: The Official Autobiography – which doesn’t once mention his former One Direction bandmates by name – jars with the singer’s handwritten lyrics and online presence.

By Anna Leszkiewicz

That’s how Zayn Malik frames the act of writing his autobiography in its first chapter. It’s a funny sort of introduction, one that reminds me of the self-referential opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.” Or maybe it’s more like The Catcher in the Rye: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, an what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. […] Besides, I’m not going to tell you my whole goddam autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas.”

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