Walking Through Walls - A Painfully Bad Memoir

In Walking Through Walls: A Memoir Philip Smith doesn’t spend much time sanity checking the outlandish tales of his father and his ability to heal via telephone or speak to spirit guides. All this must be taken immediately on faith, which some readers might be able to do. I wasn’t.

But even if you do accept what Smith writes about his father, you’ll still be painfully bored at the countless variations of Smith’s telling and retelling of the same exact thing. OK we get it, Smith’s Dad healed people…but do we need to hear the indepth details about each and every healing.

Somewhere along the way Philip Smith lost sight of the story and instead defaulted into trying to do a blow by blow description of his father’s life. He fails miserably in a book that will leave you feeling more trapped than uplifted. By page 200 I was desperately wishing it would end, and when I got there I was surprise at just how little time was spent on a fairly climatic event.

There are so many better memoirs than Walking Through Walls, I’d highly recommend spending your time with them. I suggest: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir,  Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, A Million Little Pieces (even though it’s fiction too) or Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction  – all of them infinitely better than this one.