SOURCE: "Over the Edge," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXIII, No. 13, August 5, 1976, pp. 38-9.

In the following excerpt from a review of Laing's The Facts of Life and David Reed's Anna, Dinnage negatively compares the former book to The Divided Self.

Laing's new book [The Facts of Life] is more about the factlessness of life than about its facts. It has a chill air of slackness and confusion. Laing begins with a short—too short—autobiographical sketch, which gives us a few devastating glimpses of his early life: the only child of estranged parents, his mother ill after his birth, his care at the hands of a "drunken slut"; he and his mother sleeping in one bedroom of a Glasgow tenement, his father in the other; his mother fainting when, at fifteen, he used the phrase "fuckin' well" without knowing what it meant; and at...