Included is the period he lived with his unstable grandmother, during which time he reports fragmentary memories of sexual abuse at the hands of her suitors.
He studied the works of Indian spiritual master and mystic Meher Baba, and while he was able to avoid drugs and extramarital sex most of the time, Townshend says he periodically lapsed and indulged in cocaine and alcohol.
[21][22] Townshend wrote that he had accepted the caution only because "I was in no frame of mind to live through another eternity – this time in court",[23] although he later wished he had gone to trial to prove his innocence.
[24] Music journalist Rob Sheffield writing in Rolling Stone called Who I Am "intensely intimate" and "candid to the point of self-lacerating".
[12] The Guardian said that while many rock memoirs "run out of gas once the classic songs dry up and the major crises have been overcome", Townshend's life "was never dull".
[9] Literary critic Michiko Kakutani writing in The New York Times said Who I Am "is an earnest, tortured, searching book", and was impressed with the way Townshend documented how the Who "articulate[d] the joy and rage" of post-World War II Britain's "teenage wasteland" generation.
[25] British journalist Simon Garfield in a review in The Observer complained that the book is too "well-behaved and ordered" and lacks the exuberance of Keith Richards's "indulgent memoir", Life.
[26] He said Who I Am is "insightful about the creative process", and is "a worthwhile, comprehensive and culturally valuable account of a life", but "it didn't leave me with the sense of elation I normally feel after brushes with the Who".
[26] Rock music critic Robert Christgau said in The New York Times that while he was impressed by Townshend's literary career, he tries to cram too much into the book, leaving little room to make the text "come alive".
He said that the "pretentiousness" and the "endless [...] therapy" that pervades the book "makes you long for the angry yobbo who clobbered Abbie Hoffman at Woodstock, [and] got kicked out of every Holiday Inn in the world".