This viral young writer can be funny – so why is he making up facts?
In 2017, when Vice Media was at its irreverent peak and virality was a writer’s currency, the name Joel Golby became synonymous with a certain type of homegrown journalism. He was Vice’s most-read author, with a laddish humour softened by a very English self-deprecative streak and elevated by a skill for turning the crude or mundane – pubs, house parties, landlords, drugs – into astute reflections on modern living. His feature on “101 ways to ruin a party” remains one of the funniest articles on the internet. His style was so distinctive that I once picked up a cocktail menu at an east London bar and felt certain that Golby had ghostwritten it. I asked the bartender, who, a little stunned, said, yes, they were friends.
Like every fêted young writer, Golby has been described as a voice of his generation. Dolly Alderton, herself “the millennial answer to Nora Ephron” (pace Elizabeth Day), called Golby “a millennial answer to David Sedaris”. Golby was given a TV column by the Guardian. When in 2019, he published his debut book – a memoir of sorts in the form of 21 personal essays – it was blurbed by Sharon Horgan (and Russell Brand). Golby called it Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant, an irksome title that seemed to have put most reviewers off. But he’s nothing if not self-aware: he said in an interview that while funny at first, the title quickly became “supremely annoying” and failing to change it, despite his early doubts, was “the ultimate self-own”.
That seems to be the spirit of his second book, Four Stars, also a kind of memoir, chronologically presented via reviews of various moments in his life to which star ratings are affixed. Golby reviews the trifling and tangible as well as the important and abstract, from an almond croissant (100 stars) and Howard Leight earplugs (five stars) to the phone call from his Guardian editor firing him for using a column to fantasise about Victoria Pedretti rather than actually reviewing The Haunting of Hill House (zero stars).
It is this phone call, we’re told, that sent Golby into a self-loathing funk. He began to question money, purpose, friendships, the fragile armour of masculinity, and the unprocessed grief from losing both his parents by the age of 25. As with Brilliant…, it is on these issues that Golby demonstrates his undeniable talent as a writer, able to distil relatable reflections from the absurdities of daily life. Killing a houseplant (zero stars), for instance, prompts him to consider the “deep inky poison that lives within me” and taps into a question that niggles at us all: am I a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person? His review of becoming obsessed with vitamin supplements leads to contemplations on male hair-loss, incontinence and fertility.
The reviews that feature understated dialogue are the most revealing, particularly those with his sensible friend Michael, who chides Golby for sending an emoji to a mutual friend who had just lost his mother: just because you’ve confronted grief doesn’t mean you know how to help a friend with theirs. Similarly, when Golby responds to a male friend’s break-up with a joke about unfollowing the ex’s Instagram, he offers a fleeting but touching look at male bravado. His friend answers, “I’m actually pretty cut up about it mate”; Golby passively watches the ‘typing’ notification flicker for “a really long time”, until his friend finally settles with “But yeah.” One of Golby’s last reviews, an imaginary conversation with his late father over a pint, is heart-wrenching in its subtlety.
More heavy-handed, however, is the comic filler. Brilliant… was at its weakest when Golby worked himself up into frothing rants about murdering bad landlords, or ranked every single property he’d ever rented. While Four Stars has moments that will make you chuckle – he describes reacting to the phrase “sleep hygiene” with “the kind of gruesome low laugh goths teach themselves to do instead of getting laid” – the slapstick humour becomes tiring. A review of an interview he recorded with himself while eating a limited-edition Big Mac and high on weed gummies would only have been interesting had I also been high. A review of a paper cut, I felt, was scraping the barrel.
And it was rather surprising to discover, after querying some curious details with Golby’s publicist, that many “memories” here, such as that crucial phone call with the Guardian editor, are in fact fiction. Golby was never fired. Semi-fictional memoir can work well with grander ambitions, but when so many chapters of Four Stars are purposefully mundane, or seem to exist as mere vehicles for Golby’s punchlines, the discrepancy jars.
Increasingly, with books by young, starry writers with social-media followings, you’re left wondering whether their editors are too starstruck to do their job properly. A tight edit on the jokes, cutting some of those silly filler chapters entirely, would have allowed Golby’s natural comedy to sparkle. I also wonder whether, at the tender age of 36, anybody can really justify two memoirs – though that might explain why Golby had to make some of this one up.
Four Stars: A Life Reviewed is published by Mudlark at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
