Clara’s Verdict
I finished Loose Head on a Sunday afternoon and immediately wanted to ring someone who follows rugby to tell them about it. Joe Marler has a public persona – loud, funny, occasionally controversial, reliably entertaining in post-match media – and this memoir delivers something more substantive than the persona alone. The Marler who narrates this book is candid about mental health in ways that professional sport rarely encourages, honest about the gap between how elite rugby looks from the outside and what it costs from within a scrum, and genuinely self-examining in a way that distinguishes itself from the merely entertaining sports book. He is not performing earnestness; he is working something out, and the difference is audible throughout. When he describes the nickname Psycho, what it meant to carry it, and the distance between what that label implied and who he understood himself to be, the memoir earns its claim to honesty in a way that feels neither theatrical nor calculated.
Marler’s voice is immediately distinctive: dry, self-deprecating, occasionally absurd, entirely free of the motivational-speaker language and the carefully curated vulnerability that infects so much modern sports memoir. This is an unguarded book, which is rare. Rated 4.6 out of 5, published by Penguin Audio in October 2020.
About the Audiobook
The memoir covers Marler’s journey from what he calls, with characteristic directness, ‘a fat kid’ with the nickname Psycho to one of England’s most celebrated loosehead props, through to the 2019 Rugby World Cup final in Japan – a run that took in enormous physical sacrifice, significant personal difficulty, and a career that outlasted several generations of teammates. But the book is as much about what happens at the margins of professional sport as at its centre. Marler’s account of a single match as the equivalent of surviving thirty car crashes is not hyperbole designed for effect; it is a genuine attempt to communicate what the accumulated physical toll actually means across a career of a decade or more. The sections on team culture are distinctive – the specific bonds formed in the scrum and the changing room, the unspoken codes and the rituals that hold a professional squad together, including what he refers to as rugby’s secret naked wrestling traditions, which he describes with a matter-of-factness that is both disarming and genuinely informative.
The memoir does not pretend professional rugby is a healthy environment. It describes it honestly, with affection and criticism coexisting throughout, and loves it anyway. That tension is what gives the book its particular character.
The Narration
Marler narrates his own memoir, and this is non-negotiable in the best possible sense. The voice is not separable from the content – the comic timing, the genuine emotion in the passages about family and mental health, the self-awareness that surfaces in how he describes his most embarrassing moments. No professional narrator could replicate what Marler achieves simply by being himself on the recording. The episodic structure – noted by one reviewer as slightly disjointed – functions well in audio because it creates natural pauses and allows shorter listening sessions without losing coherence. Each chapter is substantially self-contained. At 8 hours and 12 minutes, the length is exactly right for the material and the format.
What Readers Say
Reviewer Cmg, describing themselves as a lifelong Marler admirer, wrote that the book ‘solidified everything I have ever thought of the man,’ and felt it corrected years of media misrepresentation that had reduced his public image to the most convenient version rather than the actual person. Kevin Langstaff was admirably brief and definitive: ‘Funny, honest and a great read. Plus the man is a legend.’ Reviewer Irvine noted the episodic structure as something that could be engaged with in any order without losing the thread – unusual advice for a memoir, but genuinely useful for listeners who want flexibility in how they approach the material. Andree Birch, whose husband played rugby for years, called it ‘factual and funny,’ which contains most of what a prospective listener needs to know.
One additional note on the book’s treatment of mental health: Marler has spoken publicly about his struggles with depression and anxiety over the years, and the memoir does not treat these as a difficult chapter to be resolved and moved past. The mental health thread runs through the book alongside the rugby, as one of several things that defines who he is rather than an obstacle he overcame. For readers who come to sports memoir partly for that honesty – for the acknowledgement that success and suffering are not mutually exclusive – the memoir delivers that without sentimentality or the therapeutic narrative arc that self-help convention would impose.
Who Should Listen?
Ideal for rugby supporters who already have a sense of who Joe Marler is and want the version of him that post-match interviews do not capture. Equally accessible to anyone who enjoys honest, funny memoir writing about the gap between public image and private reality, regardless of any interest in sport. You do not need to understand the technical demands of the loosehead prop position to engage with this memoir – the game is the setting, not the subject. Listeners who have little patience for locker-room culture or the specific register of professional sport camaraderie may find some passages less engaging, but the emotional honesty of the memoir earns its humour throughout. Listen on Audible UK.
