“Nick, weren’t there four guys taking up your Winter Memoir Challenge?” asked some lad I don’t know in the comments. What fortuitous timing because I had just received the email from one of the four announcing he has pulled the trigger on publishing his first memoir.

So, with Thomas Crown having made a strong statement of intent with his memoir before Christmas, it is the turn of Oswald Kuragin to throw down the gauntlet with Millennials Among The Ruins….

You want squalor? You want Bottom World? You want to see a man mired in a world of alcohol abuse, strip-clubs, and liberal arts student go onto a long journey of Game and self-development? Well, let’s hear how Kuragin describes his memoir:

In this horrific and depressing tale, Ozz presents us with his descent into the dark depths of Edinburgh’s underbelly: the goth subculture, Pick-Up Artistry and long, freezing cold nights of excess and self-indulgence. The Twenty-First Century has never looked bleaker.

I was fortunate to receive the first draft of this last autumn and found it a good solid read. It differs from the usual daygame memoir because though Kuragin is an actual on-the-street-doing-his-sets daygamer, his book is written to cover the full panorama of squalor of which daygame is but a piece. Right from the beginning I was regaled with stories of closet homosexuals running dating skills meet-ups, of drunken strip club addicts, and of insufferably pretentious art-cafe students.

This is a proper 372-page book available now in paperback on Lulu and on Kindle at Amazon. We are lucky to have a new crop of memoirs coming through from a new bunch of writers. Let’s encourage this creative output and reward the writers for giving us another real-life document and another view on the avant-garde lifestyle we all swear allegiance to.