The Word Cloud

I'm reading Infidel at the moment, an autobiog by the Somali-Dutch MP made famous when Theo Van Gogh, her collaborator in a film about Islam & women, was killed by a religious nut case.

Infidel is a stunning book. It's simply, levelly and lethally written. You learn more about the culture of tribal-Islamic Africa, more about Saudi Arabia, and more about Islam from this book than from any number of newspaper articles or news reports. The book also does something that I did in This Little Britain, which is to remind the reader with vigour and without apology how wonderful Western, liberal democracy is - what a stunningly wonderful system it is as compared with almost any other system anywhere ever.

And I have to say, I love autobiographies. I almost love em more than novels. They can be as incisive, but they're true. I love, for example Czeslaw Milosz's Native Realm, at the top end of things literary, but I was also very impressed by our WW client, John Fenton's, Please Don't Make Me Go. I loved West With the Night. I've loved all the crazy, rubbish little memoirs that I've pillaged for my historical fiction. I'm working on a manuscript now with a WW client that's also autobiographical, and also fab.

But what are your favourites? What other yummy autobiogs do I need to get my paws on? What have you read that you love? And what did you hate? Let all have a Heated Debate!

Like you, Harry, I love autobiographies — and also biographies, and for exactly the same reasons. I've gone through highly enjoyable phases of reading nothing else. I used to belong to the Barbican public library in London which had a phenomenal biography section and I'd go home with armfuls of books.

Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go To The Dogs Tonight is extraordinarily good - a memoir of growing up in a white Rodesian farming family in the 70s, when it was getting more and more tense and embattled. Very subtly, she writes it always through the eyes - not the voice - of the age she is for any given bit, so you experience it as that child would have, picking up on the weirdness and the beauties as well as the fear and everything far, far more effectively than if you were in the hands of an adult storyteller.

Not really autobiography, but Joe Simpson (?)'s Touching the Void is stunning, though with my pickiest editor's hat on I'd say the writing is very much fit-for-purpose, but not truly memorable as the Fuller is at its best.

Mary Lee Settle's All the Brave Promises is a memoir of being a WRAF in the war: as a Yank who volunteered for ideological reasons she has a fascinating eye for that world, and it's very restrainedly moving about it. I gather her fiction's good, though I haven't read any.

Biog, not autobiog, but I've just read Judith Mackrell's biography of Lydia Lopokova, who was in the last generation of dancers trained in the Imperial Ballet School, became a mega-mega-mega star in American and then with the Ballets Russes, and then married Maynard Keynes, much to the rest of Bloomsbury's disgust. He was happily gay, and I'd always assumed it was a mariage blanche but not a bit of it: it's the most touching love match. Lovely vignette towards the end, when he's trying to rearrange the entire post-war world at the Bretton Woods conference, in between heart attacks, and she goes along with, largely to keep him alive. The suited and hatted diplomatic wives knock on her posh hotel door to take her along to some suitably decorous entertainment, and inside is Lydia, veteran of touring to the crummiest corners of the planet, thumping away at her daily practice, with strings of washing, and soup boiling ... Mackrell's amazing at conveying just what was so very special about her dancing - she's dance correspondent of, I think, The Times, and it really shows.

I love reading about the Bloomsburries and think I might order that book from the library.

Arthur Miller's Timebends; not only beautifully written but honest and, for a mega-writer, humble.
At the other extreme my father once gave me a book of Monty's memoirs (Paths to Leadership?). No doubting the great man's military achievements but the lack of modesty made for poor autobiography. If there was an auto-hagiography category, that's where I'd file it.

Monty wasn't exactly famous for being backwards in coming forwards, was he. One of the most fascinating books I've read in a long time is On The Psychology of Military Incompetence, by an ex-officer who became a psychoanalyst. Monty comes into it, as a particularly interesting case. All in all, the army were outraged, and tried to have the book suppressed.

The Miller sounds fascinating - yes, not a consciously starry man, at all.

oh yes - I do so love both autobographies and biographies - what is it about them or us ? Does it perhaps suggest a latent tendancy towards voyeurism. Hmmmmmmmm...

Anyway, some of my favorites...
The flame trees of Thika by Elspeth Huxley. Such a beautiful book about her childhood in Kenya set sometime between the first WW and I think about 1925.
Then there's Churchill's - My Early Life. He was a wonderful writer Churchill and his description of his failure as a scholar but his success as a soldier and his early attempts as a very young politician takes one from Sandhurst to the Sudan and the Boer Wars. It was a delightful read.
Frank Mc Court's Angela's Ashes - so much has been said about this book but from my perspective it brought home shocking truths about poverty in the so-called first world - truths that I was hitherto unaware of . Despite it's 'happy' ending, it carried disturbing echo that lingered long after the book was finished; a shocking thought - if he had not been presented with that wonderful opportunity to steal money from the dead old lady - would Frank Mc Court still be destitute and unknown, shoeless, freezing cold, in dripping Ireland?How much raw talent is wasted out there - through lack of opportunity. I think about this very often...
Has anyone read Geoff Dyer's Yoga for people who can't be bothered to do it ? he writes brilliantly and this book - a travelogue comprised of a series of short stories - all come together at the end as a resolved work that describes his dependancy on recreational drugs, his mid-life crisis and a nervous breakdown. ... grim, I know, but a work of art , to my mind.
One auto-biography I really did NOT like - but read to the end nevertheless was Doris Lessing's Under my Skin. I jhave never read a book of hers again - although her debut novel The grass is singing is a remarkable work... She was everything an auto-biographer should NOT be to my mind - arrogant, self promoting, unrepentant for abandoning her very young family ( for no clear-cut reason), oh and did I say arrogant and self promoting ? Inexcusable.

I love them too. Though I have to say I hated Angela's Ashes. I guess I just found it so relentless. Basically I enjoy reading about real people. Is this voyeurism? Nah I am doing anthropological research!

Has any one read the autobiography of Lilianne Hellman ? I haven't but she was . apparently a notorious liar ! She was quite a rotter all round apparently so anything she says about herself could make for interesting reading when seen in the light of what other's have said about her.

The author mary McCarthy famously said of Hellman that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
Hellman's response was to file a US$2,500,000 slander suit against McCarthy. McCarthy then produced evidence that Hellman had shaded the truth on many accounts of her life, including some of the information that later appeared in her book...
Just wondering if anyone's read it ?

I read her memoirs Pentimento and An Unfinished Woman an awfully long time ago. Dear God, I've just worked out how long ago it actually was and must now grope my way to a chair so this aged person can have a nice sit down. Anyway, I enjoyed them immensely but I don't know how true they were. Lillian Hellman did upset a lot of people, I know, and her left-wing political views stirred up plenty of dust at a time when America was in a collective twitch about the evils of Communism. wonder whether that has anything to do with the criticism levelled at her. Surely she isn't the only author to have varnished the truth and to have elided fact and fiction?

well there you go ! She obviously had some worth as a writer if she had this effect on a reader.

Well I do wonder how many authors of autobiography and memoirs sail close to the wind as far as the truth is concerned. I have written a memoir myself and although I haven't lied there have been times when I have used a great deal of artistic licence! Often it is difficult to remember exactly what happened when and who said what, one has to use imagination and a bit of cheek!

Yes, memory does play tricks.

Must make a note to try and get those two books - the Moon's A Balloon was highly acclaimed if I remember.
Yes , anyone who grew up with siblings should know haw very unreliable ( or at least very personal) one's memory can be. I have two sisters and it is very disconcerting ( or amusing, depending on your perspective) when we compare notes from our childhood and find out that what one of us remembers as a shining, life-changing moment the others either do not remember at all or have a completely different take on the situation ... which brings us to the question... what actually IS reality ? What is truth ? Indeed, indeed...

Have to agree with Harry: Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "Infidel" is a stunning read and a real eye-opener.

I saw her on a US TV show where the interviewer basically sneered at Ayaan's unapologetic praise for Western democracy. She looked him straight in the eye and said (paraphrasing), "It's easy for you to spit on your own freedoms, when all you have ever known is comfort and privilege. If you had been born into the situation I was born into, and born female, you might understand what you have here and cherish it."

But the book isn't preachy; it's a stunning, tragic, human story of survival. VERY moving.

I loved Chaplin's autobiography, although it's heavily self-censored. Also Lauren Bacall's "By Myself", and not just because she signed it for me and let me make her laugh (no tickling involved). Also any of Truman Capote's autobiographical essays and short stories, all of which are gems.

On the whole, I prefer biographies to autobiographies--so long as they're not by that daft dead dickhead, Albert Goldman, the vulture of literature.

Oh damn! I forgot to mention ALL

SPIKE MILLIGAN'S

WAR MEMOIRS!

"They blew me up during the war. The biggest mistake I ever made was coming back down again." Spike Milligan.

Psycho Pat - did you watch the movie on Truman Capote ? Brilliant I thought. Must try to get his writings too...

Hi Jacquie.

Yeah, I did see the movie. At least, I saw the one starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. Superb performance.

If you want to read Capote, I'm not sure where you should start, as it depends on taste. 'In Cold Blood' changed literature and even journalism; but 'Breakfast At Tiffany's' (especially when placed under the same cover as his shorts "A Diamond Guitar" and "A Christmas Memory"), is a great place to start.

Capote has a superbly descriptive, lyrical quality that matches Fitzgerald at his best. Very beautiful writing. Very moving when he wants to be. He's also scathing, bitchy, and always (0r nearly always), brutally honest. If you're interested in the latter qualities, his collected essays are for you.

Even now, we remain so close to the "celebrity" Capote that he remains underrated; although not nearly as underrated as he was some years back.

Thanks for these pointers PP.

There's a good review on Walter Kirn’s memoir, “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever”

Can be found on
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/books/review/Miller-t.html?8bu&emc=bu

Sorry abnout the size od this writing. Dont know why or what to do about it.