The Glass Cage

A blistering account of fame, class and the cost of reinvention, as John Healy confronts what happens after survival and the invisible cage success can build Nearly four decades after his acclaimed memoir The Grass Arena, John Healy delivers the long-awaited second volume of his extraordinary life. The Glass Cage begins in the wake of sudden literary success and fragile sobriety, as Healy attempts to inhabit a world far removed from the prisons, streets and wino jungle that shaped him. Thrust into publishing, publicity and middle-class expectation, he finds himself disoriented by power, privilege and the subtle humiliations of class. Written with fierce candour and dark, unsparing wit, this is a memoir not of escape, but of exposure and of the cost of crossing worlds.