Summary
portrait by mark mcnulty
Oh what a tease! I spent an entire Saturday night with my nose buried in At My Mother's Knee and Other Low Joints, only to discover that Paul O'Grady's warm, funny memoir screeches to a halt when he's 17. As cliffhangers go, this one's excruciating. In the final pages, his mum Molly lies gravely ill in hospital, his father Paddy succumbs to a fatal heart attack, and down the telephone, his sometime girlfriend, Diane, sobs: "You're going to be a father."See the full content of this document
Extract
The O'grady Bunch
I'd devote a week of Sundays to learning not what happened next, but how on earth? How did this self-described "tough little boy", who never wanted to be called by a girl's name and who is still repelled by any gathering of "really hissy queens", transform himself into the redoubtable drag artiste, Lily Savage?
At our meeting in a Liverpool hotel, O'Grady cuts an immaculate figure, encased in an exquisite bespoke suit, veined with regal purple. He's as down to earth as Tarmac, joking, as he ferries a full cup of tea up two flights of stairs, about all the practice he's had balancing trays while working in bars.The suspense is killing me, I tease, and he assures me he's ...See the full content of this document
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