Webb’s honest memoir unpicks masculinity

Skinny and malcoordinated, on the football pitch he would “welcome the sight of the ball arching towards me in the same way that a quadriplegic nudist covered in jam welcomes the sight of a hornet”. He suffered immense shame at being unable to succeed at the things that boys were expected to be good at and the worst part is that as he was not made to feel bad by other boys, his shame came from within.

Part of the problem, Webb eventually realises, is that his father was an unpredictable, drunken bully. Robert lived his early childhood in constant fear. But he writes movingly about how he and his father became reconciled later on as he realised they have both been damaged by a society that demands men behave in a certain way. If men are expected to keep quiet about their feelings but they then suffer grief and rejection, they don’t know what to do with these feelings other than turn them into anger.

However it took Webb a long time to learn this lesson. He writes about the obnoxious way he behaved after his mother died of cancer and again later when he became a father for the first time.

This is not a story of spectacular misfortune or unbelievably bad behaviour. It is a fairly ordinary story – and this is precisely Webb’s point. So many men go through this low-level suffering and it is completely avoidable.

calls for a change in attitudes to how society tells men and boys they must behave – but the seriousness of Webb’s mission does not prevent the book from being hilarious.