'Are you sure you're cut out for this?' The question was put to the author in the fields of girls, commerce, teaching, advertising, film and radio, and in all of them the answer was no. Only in literature did he manage to come good. Incompetence is the leitmotif of Mug Shots, and the result is the funniest memoir since Clive James's unreliable ones. Mug Shots is the autobiography of prize-winning novelist and playwright Barry Oakley, now eighty, from his Catholic childhood and education in Melbourne.