Townshend credits his difficult childhood with several events that came to pass in his future. In the 1993 Rolling Stone interview he credits smashing his first guitar as a young teenager in response to his grandmother yelling at him to “Turn that f**king row down!” In a more recent Rolling Stone interview from 2012, he recalls discussing with his mother the years with his grandmother during the writing of Who I Am, which helped him come to terms with the way in which that time had influenced him as an artist and a person: “I started to see why so much of my writing is so dark, why so much of my cold presence on the stage appeared to be angry, rage…What I discovered in the book is all of this stuff made me who I am.“

The 2012 New York Times article notes that Townshend’s stories about his childhood also underscored the biographical aspects of The Who’s rock opera Tommy, which “recounts the story of a traumatized and abused boy who goes on to become a kind of pop messiah.” Townshend also wrote about his 2003 arrest on charges of suspicion of possession of child pornography; months after his arrest, he was cleared of all charges, and noted in an official press statement quoted by Ultimate Classic Rock that the charges stemmed from viewing said images as “part of personal research while writing his autobiography…with no nefarious purposes.”