Charles Foran is an acclaimed author and contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine. His reputation, however, could hardly be enhanced by his memoir of childhood. The Story of My Life (So Far) is an experiment gone badly awry, for its naiveté is patently false and its style tedious. When James Joyce mimicked a child early in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, he was wise enough to limit this mimesis to a few pages. Foran wallows almost unrelenting in a recreation of a child’s diction, imagery, and sentiments.

In 1971, 10-year-old Foran completed a Grade 5 project in autobiography. What should have stayed innocently amusing and revealing, has, alas, been expanded into a badly judged perspective of childhood. This memoir spans five years, carrying us from 1965 into the age of Trudeau, Martin Luther King Jr., and Neil Armstrong. The milieu is Willowdale, Ontario; the sensibility, Irish Catholic. Father carves model ships and is anti-royalist. Mother comes from Montreal and has rough relatives in Blind River. Charlie has an older sister (nicknamed Puss) and a younger brother (nicknamed Toad). He also has a stuffed pet that gets run over by a truck. His chums include Jimmy (who tells tall tales about punishment and monsters) and Pete (with whom he wrestles in a ditch), and notorious figures such as Lenny Grusa and weird, lonely Allan, the “ghost-boy.”

Some of the incidents and anecdotes are humorous – especially the ones about the nativity play, Charlie’s spontaneous erections, his confessions to benign, chuckling Father Ferguson, and some others are tense, such as the ones about sadistic Sister Mary Wyatt or the cruelly teased Nellie Parker. But there isn’t anything exceptional in any of them, even though Charlie’s anxiety about baloney sandwiches (they remind him of the Body of Christ) and wet running shoes (they will be a giveaway to his mother that he kissed a girl down by the creek) are the stuff of childhood. But occasional pleasures are offset by startling warps in language and wit, where Foran seems to forget his mimic voice and sounds like a self-conscious adult out to shape an anecdote to his own purpose.