MEMOIR
The Age
Saturday December 5, 2009
LYNNE Truss is the English journalist and novelist who made punctuation fun in Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It is no surprise then that she has turned her four-year sojourn as a sports writer into a witty, insightful and at times hilarious book. Mind you, her editor on The Times knew what he was doing in 1996 when he gave this much-respected journalist the job. Apart from annoying the the predominantly male sports writers, Truss produced sparkling pieces with fresh and insightful observations.Her research for different jobs was at times desperate, if not eclectic. In preparation for the 1999 Holyfield-Lewis world heavyweight title bout in America, she read Joyce Carol Oates. A boxing enthusiast, Oates opines that while organised games such as football or tennis may be metaphors for war and combat, boxing is simply boxing, two men whose sole intention is to beat each other up.Truss says that "the assimilation of sudden and improbable expertise was the story of my life in those days". For most of the time she was a sports writer, equipped with binoculars and an enigmatic smile. She would constantly ask herself to think, think afresh, "Lynne, what the f--- are you doing here?"Well, gathering material for a vastly entertaining book was one thing.
© 2009 The Age