With the multiple suicide attempts? With the cleaning products poured down the throat because there was simply nothing left in the house to drink? Or what about way, way back at the beginning with Betty McGrath's terrified and tortured pregnancy? No, too many to choose from. Too much to go through.

So let's start at the finish. In keeping with pretty much every page that has gone before, the book of Paul McGrath's life doesn't go out with a happy ending. His final words have him facing into a future laden with the same uncertainty as the past he's just detailed in the preceding 360 pages. He declares that the past is unchangeable now, that it's time to start looking to that future. And although there won't be a single person who gets to that page who doesn't hope against hope that he does just that, there'll be equally few left with the confidence he will.

Because this is a horrible story, harrowing and depressing at every turn. What might on the surface have looked like the good times in McGrath's life were almost without exception played out against a backdrop of horrific personal strife. The 1992/93 season was the best of his playing career, the one in which the footballers of England chose him as their Player of the Year, but it was also the one in which his first marriage fell apart and was bookended by two brushes with death on one side and the tabloid revelation of a daughter resulting from one of his affairs on the other.

In fact, one of the rare times in the book he declares himself to have been happy is on the night of his legendary display against Italy during USA '94 when, with seemingly every other Irish person in America and worldwide drinking the night away, he sat sober and contented on the team bus outside Meadowlands in New Jersey. He remembers not being in the least bit jealous of the rest of the squad who were inside celebrating, just safe and in a good place for that moment.

It's a moment recounted right at the beginning of the book, a tiny spoonful of sugar to help out with the gallons of medicine to come. What follows is a disarmingly . . . and, at times, distressingly . . . honest and graphic account of a life played out in front of our eyes and torn to pieces away from our gaze. The misery is relentless, from the opening recall of a soul-shredding day wandering around Manchester trying to stop himself walking into the reception area at Old Trafford to ask for the lend of £100 to the closing admission that there is no rainbow on the horizon.

It's an astonishing book, one that should, by rights, have bookstores everywhere taking the various My Storys of Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard down off their shelves to make room. There's a level of truth in it that few people who aren't self-confessed addicts ever reach. The tone is that of the alcoholic's humility, of the man who wants it known he's aware he brought it all upon himself.

In that and throughout, McGrath's ghostwriter Vincent Hogan has done a masterful job. The book isn't just written with the voice of Paul McGrath; there are segments of interviews with those who were there along the way interspersed to give a fuller picture. There's also a chapter written in the firstperson by Betty McGrath, Paul's mother. No part of his life is untouched, no punch pulled even though it's himself who's the target of every blow.

There are definitely times when it borders on becoming too much. Compelling doesn't come close to describing McGrath's story but when you read it, you will certainly get to passages that make you want to put it down and take a break from it. You might even feel like a voyeur in places, an uncomfortable intruder on what for most people would generally remain private grief.

This isn't a criticism, though. Not remotely. The truth is a discomfiting guest in any house but it's the only explanation that works every time we're looking for answers. And here, the truth has delivered the most heartbreaking book you'll put your hands on in any genre this year.

'Back From The Brink', by Paul McGrath with Vincent Hogan, is published by Century, price /27.90