Playwright Michel Tremblay’s book offers a dozen pieces, ranging from a short sentimental statement (which gives the book its title) to anecdotal satiric narratives about his boyhood, and adolescent pleasures at the movies. He reminisces about many things, from the tear-jerking Bambi tale and Cinderella (with its fantastically conceived, funny-voiced animals) to Laurel and Hardy, Fifties horror movies, The King And I, and weepy French romances and melodramas. But his book isn’t really a movie chronicle or meditation: it’s really an act of memory, sometimes written in a much too informal style, that offers sociological and psychological insights into Tremblay’s maturation.

When the lights go down, young Tremblay (the youngest of three male children in a working-class Montreal family), with a bag of chips and a large bottle of Coke, finds himself enrapt at the spectacle of “Death” trying to steal Jean Marais away from a pregnant wife, or utterly jealous at the sight of Yvonne Laflamme, his own age, playing an abused child. Virtually every piece is constructed like a sequence of scenes, dynamically charged by pithy dialogue from various characters within and outside his family. Virtually every movie experience is an adventure into terra incognita, usually in literal terms. Outremont is for the rich; the district north of Laurier is an Italian enclave; and Cartier Street changes into an area for Vietnamese. Many parts of Montreal are Anglo preserves. There is no French cinema for the longest while, and even when young Tremblay tries to steal pleasure by listening to the soundtrack of The King and I in a record booth at Eaton’s, he is treated like “a dog turd on a velvet cushion.”

The real value, then, of this collection is not its assessments of movie art or its signposts of Tremblay’s developing literary interests, but the evocation of milieu and rites of passage. Tremblay’s collection never seeks to deny his socioethnic roots, the anomalies of his family, or his burgeoning homosexuality. It is not great literature, but it is honest, sometimes to the point of literary embarrassment, as in the presentation of a novella he composed as a teenager.