Category: autobiography

AN EDUCATION by Lynn Barber

Lynn Barber is a fun old battleaxe and her book is an entertaining read. The movie, which follows her affair as a school girl with an older con man, really covers only the first two chapters of the book. The remainder follows her life up to the present, and is undoubtedly an education in what it meant to be born female in the 1940s.

Horrifyingly, for example, when the older con man asks her to marry him, right after high school, her parents encourage her to do so even though this apparently means that she must give up her place at Oxford. Apparently the logic is that if you are married you don’t need to go to university. The poor deluded girl agrees, but luckily for her the conman is revealed to be already married, so she is allowed a tertiary education.

On the plus side, they haven’t yet heard of HIV, so she tells us “I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year.” This sounds fun, but then “there was no afterwards, either because the sex was a disaster, or because my pretence of sexual confidence scared them off. I did great, noisy, pretend orgasms with lots of “Yes! Yes!” . . .But I still hadn’t experienced the real thing.”

She begins to have some success as a journalist, despite the idea – apparently prevalent at the time – that women graduates ought to work their way up from secretary. Touchingly, she falls in love with her husband at first sight, and stays married to him till his death. The last long section while he is mortally ill in hospital is really moving. Barber is brutally honest about what she perceives as her failures during this period – she became annoyed with her sick husband, tried to avoid him, and so on. It’s a testament to the fact that neither grief nor love are orderly or as we expect, which I found comforting.

FEVER PITCH by Nick Hornby

Everybody has embarrassing hang-ups. Most people do not talk about these hang-ups, and certainly most people do not write books about them, so I feel Nick Hornby is to be applauded for the horrible honesty which he brings to his autobiographical book, FEVER PITCH, in which he discusses his relationship with football.

Nick Hornby likes football. He likes football a lot. More than he should really be admitting.

His obsession began when he was taken to a football match by his father, after his parents’ divorce, and this is where the book begins. Hornby theorizes that he may have become so involved with football at that time in an attempt to bond with his father, or to model masculine behaviour, now he lived only with women. This sounds to me like the sort of ‘explanation’ you get from books such as ROOTS OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS FOR DUMMIES, but whatever the reasons for his obsession, it came to dominate his life.

Hornby went to Cambridge, where he did not work very hard, and then found himself to be rather lost for a while, working at various times as an administrator, and as a teacher. After losing his first serious girlfriend, he struggled to maintain a relationship. He attended the matches of his team, Arsenal, religiously, and in many ways lived through their successes and failures, more than his own. He never, ever, misses a match, even when very ill, and is emotionally bound up in their successes and failures to an extent that is basically creepy. Thus for example, when Arsenal wins some big championship (I don’t know which, I’m sorry, I found the straight football bits boring) he actually begins to turn his own life around, eventually becoming a writer.

In addition to being rather sad, for Hornby clearly struggles very painfully to sort out his life, the book is in many ways very funny. Thus, discussing a man he sees who has died of a heart attack immediately after a match, he comments: ‘It worries me, the prospect of dying in mid-season like that,’ and continues, ‘The whole point about death, metaphorically speaking, is that it is almost bound to occur before the major trophies have been awarded.’

So a painfully honest, strangely intimate, and very funny book, about what it means to love something more than you should.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves

Graves wrote this memoir when he was just a year older than me, 34, going through an ugly divorce, and on the point of leaving England forever. It is an awesome exercise in wholesale bridge burning.

It makes me feel like writing my memoirs, except that fortunately for me I have not had quite such an event filled life as Graves, who was in that unlucky generation that left high school in 1914, and so swapped one uniform for another, entering the First World War as teenagers.

We begin with his childhood, which is largely spent in one of these famously damaging English public schools, and he seems to have been accordingly damaged. He is bullied relentlessly (honest to god, where are the ADULTS in these places? When I was teaching I regarded one of my main jobs as keeping a beady eye on the big ones – anyway), until he takes up boxing. He has some success with this, and that seems to help keep the worst kids off him. He’s also astonishingly frank, for a book written in 1934, about falling in love with a younger boy, Dick.

On graduation, he volunteers for the army and is sent to France. The first dead person he sees there is a soldier who has killed himself rather than carry on, and things go downhill from there. Graves writes a very straightforward account, including detailed accounts of the bungling by high command. At one point he is declared dead, and his mum gets the condolence telegram, but with all the rude health of nineteen he pulls through.

On one of his leaves he marries a young woman and when the war ends they live in Oxford together. You might think, from the prosaic way he writes, that he was not as damaged by the war as some; but then he calmly tells you all about how he keeps seeing dead people piled up on the streets, and how these daymares are with him constantly until at least 1928.

He has four children by his wife, who is an early feminist, and when they lose all their money in a failed business venture, very laudably pitches in with this mountain of childcare for many years. Even more laudably, given that this book is written during a bitter divorce, he refrains from bashing on the feminist wife too much.

A grimly honest account of an interesting thirty four years.

THE LAST RESORT by Douglas Rogers

This book tells the story of the author’s parents’ attempts to hold on to their land during the decade of Zimbabwe’s collapse from about 2000 on. The perspective is surprisingly honest: Douglas Rogers couldn’t wait to shake the dust of Africa from his feet, and can’t understand why his parents would fight to stay.

Rogers grew up on various farms in eastern Zimbabwe, and once he left school fled this rural idyll as fast as he could. On retirement, his parents bought a rocky piece of land and decided to run a backpackers lodge, which did well initially, until the economy, and thus the tourism industry, began to crumble.

That Rogers worked as a journalist for many years is abundantly clear from this book. The style is simple and unaffected, and the plot moves quickly enough to keep the attention of any commuter. This is almost to a fault; the book is sort of forgettable, though the story is not.

After the backpackers left, the prostitutes started arriving, then a small dagga business (that’s pot to the non-African readers), then the dispossessed farmers (both black and white), then the illegal diamond dealers, then, most dangerously, the MDC activists in hiding during the dark days of 2008 (that’s during the bloody elections, non-Zimbabwean readers). Meanwhile the possibility of their land being seized was constantly in the air; at one point they found out that their property deed had been cancelled, and ‘vested in the president,’ without their even being informed.

It’s a very intimate portrait of his parents, and of their struggle to maintain not just their lives (it gets very dodgy at the end), and their land, but their definition of themselves as Zimbabwean. In the final chapters, when the father is taking considerable risks protecting the MDC members, there’s a very sweet section about how, for the first time in his life, and for the first time in the history of his family in Africa (an impressive 350 years) he is at last on the right side of history.

This books sounds quite tragic, but is largely written in the comic vein, which is I think very Zimbabwean. It also a story more of victory, than of defeat. I hope that’s very Zim too, though possibly not.

Here’s a rather sweet interview with the author.

I DREAMED OF AFRICA by Kuki Gallmann

This book recounts the author’s life in Kenya. Originally from Italy, she had always been fascinated by Africa, and eventually moved there with her second husband, buying a large ranch on which they kept cattle and provided a safe haven for wildlife.

She provides an interesting picture of Kenya in the 70s and 80s, at the tail end of the Happy Valley period, and includes many accounts of her intimate experience with African wildlife. The heart of the book however is her various bereavements. Her husband is killed in a car crash, and then a few years later, her son, an amateur herpetologist, is killed by a puff adder. Their funerals are minutely recorded, as are those of two or three of her friends.

Now, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by this.

I think I may have a heart of stone.

Great suffering does not necessarily make a great novel. Heartfelt sincerity, while important, is not all you need. (Oscar Wilde: “All bad poetry is sincere.” Ouch)

Now, before you start hating me in the Comments, let me give you an extract, and you hand on heart try and tell me that this is not dreadful:

There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa . . . A last eagle flies majestically back to nest on steep cliffs.

Clearly, while she may have dreamed of Africa, she did not dream of writing without cliché.

In the interests of fairness, I should say it is very readable, especially if you skip the funerals. I couldn’t sleep last night, and polished off about 200 pages from 1am.

I admire the lady, who has a genuine and inspiring love for the Kenyan landscape, and has had a genuinely terrible time; but I just cannot admire the writer.

BILLY BROWN I’LL TELL YOUR MOTHER by Bill Brown

This is an autobiographical tale of growing up in the years immediately after the second World War.

Some aspects of it are quite interesting: the aspirational nature of council housing (that really bends the mind, today); the sense of community; the fun to be had in bombed out houses. It’s also an engaging and pleasant read, and you find yourself caring for the characters, and believing in their world.

In general however I have to confess I found it a tiny bit cheesy. Apparently, immediately after the war, no one ever had any complex or contradictory feelings, and no arguments were ever serious.

I suspect that it is perhaps read and loved by people who remember that time, and in particular perhaps by those who like to tut tut about today.