Audio Books by Tony Parsons.
Tony Parsons grew up on an Essex council estate and began his career as a music journalist on the NME, writing about punk music and "taking drugs with the Sex Pistols". Later, he wrote for The Daily Telegraph, before going on to write his current column for the Daily Mirror. Parsons briefly hosted a series on Channel 4 called Big Mouth.
Parsons married fellow NME journalist Julie Burchill - they had both answered the same advert in the paper requesting "hip, young gunslingers" to apply as new writers. He and Burchill collaborated on a book in 1979 – The Boy Looked at Johnny –. They divorced acrimoniously.. Julie Burchill is invariably critical of Parsons in interviews, although he generally prefers to demur on the subject of their relationship. Together they had a son, Bobby Kennedy Parsons.
In 1990 he wrote Bare, an authorised biography of his friend, popstar George Michael. Despite not having a written contract with the singer, proceeds from the book were split equally between the two. However, they fell out in 1999 after an interview Michael had given to Parsons was published in the Daily Mirror.
Parsons wrote a number of novels including The Kids (1976), Platinum Logic (1981) and Limelight Blues (1983), before he found mainstream success by focussing on the tribulations of thirty-something men, in a series of novels which include Man and Boy (winner of the 2001 British Book of the Year award) , Man and Wife, The Family Way, and One for My Baby. He is consequently often credited as being a prominent exponent (along with Nick Hornby) of the so-called lad-lit genre, and as such has become something of a target for feminists. His most recent novel, Stories We Could Tell , reflects Parsons' Seventies' career as an NME journalist.
