I’ve been thinking recently about the arrogance of extrapolation. Of imagining that your own personal experiences are so important, so unique, that they must be extrapolated from and fashioned into a lesson, even a manual, for everyone else to follow. The memoir-as-manual — it’s the new publishing craze. We’ve had Caitlin Moran’s How To Be a Woman, which, as suggested by its Victorian-style manual-for-women title, takes as its starting the point the idea that Ms Moran’s eccentric girlhood under self-impoverished bohemian parents in Wolverhampton (commentators make the mistake of calling this a working-class upbringing) contains profound insights for the entirety of womankind. We’ve had Afua Hirsch’s Brit-ish, in which Ms Hirsch’s eye-wateringly privileged upbringing in Wimbledon, and the fact she once got funny looks when she went into a shop, is extrapolated from and turned into a missive on Britain’s allegedly dysfunctional relationship with race.

And we have Robert Webb’s How Not to be a Boy. The title itself drips with this arrogance of extrapolation. Webb, a comic writer, best known as one of the stars of Peep Show alongside David Mitchell, thinks his childhood experiences have endowed him with a special insight into the predicament of men, the toxic nature of masculinity, and the necessity for 50 per cent of the population to change their ways if they want to survive. He really says this. His aim with this memoir is no less than to ‘extend that awareness [he means the gender-awareness that he has already achieved] to the half of the population who might still be under the impression that gender conditioning didn’t happen to them because they have a Y chromosome’. It’s almost religious. The Confessions of Robert Webb. I mean, I think my life has been pretty interesting, and I have certainly learned a lot from it, but turning it into a moral guide for everyone else? The very thought makes me wince. I’m no Augustine. And neither is Webb. The Art of Manliness: ... Brett McKay, Kate McKay Best Price: $1.99 Buy New $7.70 (as of 12:35 UTC - Details)

Webb’s book is in many ways an upmarket version of those miserable tomes you find in the ‘Life Stories’ section of WH Smith. It’s called ‘Life Stories’ because the more honest name would give people the willies: ‘Tragedy Porn In Which Someone Definitely Gets Raped.’ You know the kind. ‘Daddy, Please, No.’ ‘Don’t Ever Tell.’ ‘Abandoned.’ ‘Wasted.’ All featuring cover images of doe-eyed toddlers hiding in the shadows. ‘Roll up, roll up, watch this kid get battered’, the strapline might as well say. Webb’s book is better written and more self-important than these perversely detailed tales of woe — he went to Cambridge, don’t you know — but it shares with them an emotional incontinence, an obsession with childhood experiences, and a sometimes shameless marshalling of other people’s stories to your story, so that most of the other people in your life end up as little more than bit-part players in your own moral psychodrama.

This really is the stuff of psychodrama. Webb bends virtually his entire life to the service of warning us of the lethal nature of distant, unchecked masculinity and how it has harmed him and you (even if you don’t know it, because you haven’t reached the same level of gender awareness as our immodest guide, you idiot). He refracts everything through the prism of Masculinity Is Bad. Everything from the tears he wept over the death of a bee (as a boy, ‘I wasn’t supposed to look after [this bee], I was supposed to stamp on it’, he says, letting us know he was superior to other blokes even when he was in shorts) to his humiliation at a sports day when the other boys deduced that he was wearing girl’s socks. (It is no doubt testament to my infection by toxic masculinity that I found myself chortling at his persecutor’s mockery: ‘Good socks, Robert! My name’s Robert and I’m a girl!’ I thought to myself, ‘Boys will be boys’, which, as Webb never tires of telling us, is a really bad thing to think.)

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