A Tipsy Fairy Tale (A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption) by Peter E. Murphy Review By Charles H. Lynch

A Tipsy Fairy Tale (A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption) by Peter E. Murphy

Review By Charles H. Lynch

Publisher: Toplight, an imprint of McFarland  & Company, Inc.

ISBN: 9-781476-695365

Publication Date: November 7, 2024

Page Numbers: 238 

Although whimsically titled a “fairy tale,” Peter Murphy’s birth to early adulthood is hardly ethereal or full of fantastical characters. His antagonists are mean or sexually abusive adults and alcohol when he tumbles from “tipsy” to abject drunk. Also, his unprogrammed sobriety becomes an entertaining feat. Unlike some twelve-steppers’tedious, proclamatory accounts, his overcomings intrigue because nimble narrative devices distinguish a writer and educator’s coming of age in perceptive, sensual intervals. Even in his soul’s darkest nights, kindness and mercy triumph over cruelty, rejection, and shame. Therefore, “in recovery” applies in three ways. Stave off drinking and drugging to heal the body and one’s life. “Recover” the past to find what he lost, then gather those pieces in a book. “Pull off the covers” and “re-cover” what can be found to create more honest and enlightening layers of fact (and fiction).  

Murphy’s tale begins in 1944 during World War II when Eddie, his father, a U.S. soldier abroad, meets Thelma, his mother, tending bar in her family’s Windsor Castle Hotel in Wales. After living until age three in Wales, Peter lives with his parents and older brother Paul in a sixth-floor walk-up in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen. His beautiful mother is erratic and depressive. After she passes suddenly in February 1958, Paul, Peter’s protector, and Peter, age seven, wind up in a Catholic boarding school on Staten Island. The memoir dramatizes the author’s quest to unpuzzle why his Mom died and his parents abandoned two sons. It also becomes a casual travelogue in which the voyager seeks the truth of his maternal family’s relationships, complicated because relatives in New York City and in Wales have obscured or changed significant facts. British heritage preserves a sense of propriety mingled with sexual repressiveness. Irish elders in New York City maintain rigid judgments due to church strictures and social and economic class prejudices.

These ethnic, religious, and cultural contexts dominate Murphy’s behavior and conscience. As a boy, he must negotiate hypocrisy and abuse from predatory priests, cruel nuns, and neighborhood bullies. His father remarries and Peter adjusts to a new family. Nevertheless, his birth family’s traumas plague him. At fifteen, he begins drinking and reading and writing poetry. A sequence of mini-adventures dramatizes how in the early 1960s he graduated from Christ the King senior high in Queens, and in 1968 flunked out of St. Bonaventure University. A committed autodidact, like his very literate and opera-loving, working-class father, Murphy enrolls in Long Island University, where a mentor honors his poetic talents and intellectual curiosity. 

The memoir profiles manic sex partners, unreachable heartthrobs, rock-and-roll band buddies, Mafia-associates, plucky Welsh relatives, an Irish Republican Army sympathizer, hippie companions, and spiritual confidantes. Murphy lands jobs as a bartender, filing clerk, porter, and a neophyte on construction sites operating a brick hoist, a small crane, and a jackhammer. In most encounters–greetings and farewells are like a leitmotif—he mulls over what to indulge, and what to dismiss. Even as he gallivants about England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland (at times as a dependent vagabond, goof-off, and lush), he is amicable, beguiling, and rarely mean-spirited. Sporadically he becomes an impostor (Laurence Moscoloni, Garry Morgan) and liar who misleads and compromises others, but his motives and actions are never vile. Finally, perseverance and fortuity generate good fortune. At twenty-one his dilemmas and confusion lessen when in March 1972, while squatting in a commune in Wales, he meets caring, patient role models, becomes a member of the Baha’i faith, and swears off liquor for good.

Like the autobiographer David Sedaris, Murphy’s refined intellect and acute intuition render him reporter and judge, sustaining a wry insouciance, intrigued by unpredictability and sticky muddles. Embedded in what can resemble a scholarly scrapbook, the poet integrates his apprentice pieces and published verse. He plays the urbane bumpkin, often conflating innocence or ignorance with stupidity to prove what trial and error can teach, like an older Huck Finn or more hip Holden Caulfield, obsessed with who’s for real and who’s phony. As a self-mocking comedian he enchants, deploying skits, deft mimicry of dialects, and startling (and corny) wordplay. One reference looms long, the rail station on the isle of Anglesea in North Wales: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. 

The author becomes a capacious raconteur, integrating words on signs, people’s anecdotes, dialogues, telegrams, news article excerpts, dreams, and interior monologues. Fifty-eight bibliographical entries and twenty-three photos of family members, friends, and memorable settings authenticate Murphy’s search for supportive and validating sources. Frequent references to popular music conjure a resonant soundtrack, accompanied by a QR code for a SPOTIFY playlist at the back of the book. 

One narrative strategy can distract: when the writer’s conscience observes the self being enacted, yet reader or auditor is directly addressed as a companionable, sympathetic “you.” Two quoted samples exemplify my estrangement. He’s an impromptu, substitute cheerleader at a high school basketball game: “You put on the paper-mache head and hold a footlong plastic cigar in your hand. When you squeeze it, out comes a puff of talcum powder resembling smoke. You go out on the gym floor, and Poof! You’re Mr. Royal. You jump up and down getting the crowd to cheer. You sense power and you love it.” Also, passages conjured the quirky humor and unique details of locale and culture in Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. But sometimes I remained happily glued to my recliner. “Your two-day stop in the Lake District explodes into a four-week excursion. You walk, as Wordsworth walked, from Ambleside to Rydal Mount to Grasmere to Keswick to Coniston to Hawkshead and back to Ambleside, all the time reading and rereading his poems in the places he’s writing about.” Too exhausting a tromp, and I thrill to only a few of Wordsworth’s poems. 

What is most important is this memoir’s rejuvenating power. Just as Peter E. Murphy, a child of the 1950s and 1960s, battled abandonment and alienation, in tumultuous 2025 so do sons and daughters “left” by birth parents and unsettled within hybrid families. They self-medicate with liquor and drugs, fashion themselves as wannabes and migrate to online friends they never meet in the flesh. They invest symbolic and virtual selves in the images, voices, and shared creeds of social media and popular music. Therefore, Murphy’s odyssey is instructive for anyone navigating job loss, dropping out of school, breaking relationships, overwhelmed by loneliness and anomie. For this memoir celebrates imaginative resiliency, even how to benefit from temporary sanctuaries and refuge in ephemeral relationships. A Tipsy Fairy Tale proves how a creative spirit might nurture confidence that restorative love and faith await those open to bountiful change and each day’s surprises. As the author graduates from innocence and unknowing to make sense from realities encountered, he secures a positive identity and becomes an assured writer. In that respect he shares a pebbled path with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who comes of age in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Peter E. Murphy lives in Ventnor, New Jersey, and is a retired teacher of high school English. He has written eleven previous books and chapbooks of prose and poetry and is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University in Atlantic City, where he runs workshops for writers and teachers. 

4 February 2026