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Burnside's memoirs of his own tormented life are startling and memorable and written in a stark and poetic style. The book describes the existential struggle of a long suffering alcoholic in a plea for sanity, haunted by the demons of his troubled childhood. At the beginning of the book he writes,
When I was a full-scale lunatic, I suffered from a condition called apophenia. This condition, this unease, was described by Klaus Conrad, the schizophrenia specialist who coined the term, as the unmotivated seeing of connections, coupled with the specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness. In other words, seeing things that weren't there. Hearing voices in the background static. Finding God or the Devil in the last scrapings of Pot Noodles. For normal folk, this connective faculty allows them to make sense of the world, to find a modest, local and hopefully shared order by which to live. For the apophenic, it means a wild and unrelenting search for the one vast order that transcends all other hypernarrative, an afterlife - though what he ends up with is usually a tidal wave of incomprehensible and overwhelming detail: the whole world at once, jabbering constantly in a mind that can only find rest in oblivion. (p. 5)
Burnside, who attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for his alcohol addiction, wishes to confess to the group that ‘I know drinking is not something to be enjoyed like tea or flirting. Alcohol is a substitute for something else, but I can't give it up because if I do, I'll remember that something else, and that something else is unbearable…’(p. 18). The book feels like a reckless chase towards the truth, yet any truth is buried deep in darkness, insomnia, and his life is re-enacted through drugs and alcohol abuse but his desire is for the fulfilment of a simple wish to be ordinary, and he is searching for a ‘Surbiton of the mind’.