Memoir

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence) to But Beautiful (a genre-blending and largely non-irritating meditation on jazz) to Zona (a mercifully unpretentious personal

‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the

When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows. First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man, who once floated himself on the stock exchange and appeared in an ad for bottled water when already a millionaire many times over. He also had sex with children, helping himself to the virginity of a 13-year-old girl as part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ circle. I think of myself at 13. Would I have had

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the adult Linn attempts to reconstruct her headstrong 16-year-old self and recover a disturbing interlude spent in Paris as a would-be model. In 2019, Ullmann is struggling to write when her younger self materialises like an imaginary friend with a message that demands to be heard. Ullmann has a daughter now, which makes the quest to

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs. Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock. The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence,

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their

When I started working for Vanity Fair in 1995 I remember coming into the office one morning to discover that most of the senior editorial staff had disappeared. They weren’t at their desks, and phone calls went unreturned. Was this a Jewish holiday? It turned out to be the day Graydon Carter had set aside to write the ‘Editor’s Letter’, a monthly column at the beginning of the magazine signed by him but which he almost always asked one of his staff to write at the last minute. None of them wanted to be the poor schmuck saddled with the task. The reason I mention this is because the previous

It was a relatively minor episode in a period marked by the killing of two African presidents, months of massacres in churches, schools and sports stadiums, a biblical exodus by much of the Hutu population, a cholera outbreak in refugee camps established in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and a rebel takeover of the country. But it mattered a great deal to Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, the author of this book, as she was one of the children evacuated in June 1994. At 15, she did not meet the criteria stipulated by the convoy’s organisers, so she and her mother hid under a tarpaulin sat upon by the smaller

Tsundokists of the world, unite! You have a new champion in Lucy Mangan, whose follow up to her entrancing memoir of childhood reading (Bookworm) is an unabashed paean to the pleasure of acquiring more books than you could ever possibly read in your life. That does not stop Mangan from trying, and this is a whirlwind tour through her voracious, encyclopaedic adult reading habit, one that not so much offers evidence of ‘how reading shapes our lives’, but how life shapes our reading. The ‘forced march’ of patriarchal school set texts in Mangan’s teens is relieved when she inherits a Maeve Binchy doorstopper and first encounters a book that is

Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to have inhibited him much. He was sexually precocious from the age of 12, as his autobiographical novel A Boy’s Own Story (1982) first suggested. But it may account for the determined frankness with which he has treated sex in both his fiction and memoirs. For an author who came of age in pre-liberation America, erotic