Jim E. Brown’s new autobiographical memoir, Brown on Brown: The Autobiography of Jim E. Brown; Vol 1: The Early Years (2021), is most definitely a book, in the sense that it contains the minimum number of pages required to be considered such, forty-eight. There is a lot of white space on these pages. One must be careful, however, not to let the relative lightness of the product take away from the heft of its tale. It’s quite good.

Jim E. Brown is most definitely 19 years old, and he most certainly hails from Didsbury, Manchester, United Kingdom. You can be assured of both of these facts because the author provides them many times. Frequent place-dropping of locations in and around Didsbury reinforce this truth: Dmitri’s Tapas Taverna, Ye Olde Cock Inn, Greedy’s Fish n Chips. Unfortunately, certain Americanisms, such as “Red Bull Vodka” instead of “Vodka Red Bull” have crept into the language of even this Manchester youth. Worse yet, the American band Phish is one of his favorites, but not, he explains, for their musical ability. Fair enough. Fair play to you. The book is published in Delaware. At the end of the day, it is what it is.

Jim E. Brown is rather fond of canned bread, eggs, Bellhaven Scottish stout, and sausage. All of that is quite nice. He hates peas, and he has a more complicated relationship with ambien, the drug that killed his father, a supermodel and canned-breadwinner of the household. He also like the fruit snack Gushers.

For a 19-year old, Jim E. Brown has had quite a few short but serious relationships with women, all of whom were his elder. The later part can be explained by a few central facts of his life. Jim E. was born with several degenerative conditions that make him age preternaturally fast. A steady diet of alcohol and protein may have also contributed to this, if one wishes to make inferences beyond the literal story told by the author. Indeed, by five years of age, the alcoholic, egg-filled Jim E. passed as an adult and was able to procure alcohol from the shops, mostly with stolen money or earnings from panhandling. Unfortunately, Jim E. Brown’s relationships with women generally end when a minor perceived slight motivates an outburst in the style of Everett True.

Jim E. Brown is motivated not only by a deep craving for alcohol and women, but also by a great fear that he will end up in a Shacklebury Heights, a home (work prison) for boys, where his brother Mark F. is stripped of all individuality and humanity. Jim E., a master of disguise, sneaks into Shacklebury to add two boiled eggs (a favorite!) to his brother’s allotted meal of daily slop. When Jim E. takes a vacation to the American state of Maine, he coincidentally encounters his brother working at a canned bread factory.

At the end of the day, this autobiography demonstrates the depth of the British mind and the wholesomeness of Manchester culture. No American author under the age of forty can compare their lived experiences to those of Jim E.