Category Autobiography and memoir

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Slow Poison by Mahmood Mamdani review – can you really rehabilitate Idi Amin?

The anthropologist and father of New York’s mayor-elect offers a revisionist view of modern Ugandan history

Children of Ugandan Indians are having a bit of a moment. Electropop boasts Charlie XCX; statecraft, the Patels: Priti the shadow foreign secretary, Kash the FBI boss. And while the ones who go into politics have tended to be conservative, we now have a counterexample in Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist who clinched the New York mayoralty at the beginning of this month.

The anomaly is best explained by the politics of his father, Mahmood Mamdani. The apple, it seems, did not roll especially far down the postcolonial hillside. Mahmood, professor of government and anthropology at Columbia University, has long styled himself as the left’s answer to VS Naipaul. Where the Nobel-winning curmudgeon surveyed postcolonial Africa with disdain, revelling in the wreckage of independence, Mamdani presents a more forgiving view: pathos instead of pity, paradox instead of despair. If independence didn’t live up to the promise, he argues, it was because the colonised had been dealt a losing hand.

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Future Boy by Michael J Fox review – secrets from the set of a definitive 80s movie

The actor’s account of his big Hollywood break – and how it almost never happened

Michael J Fox has already eked out four books of Hollywood memoir, so the justification for a fifth – written with longtime collaborator Nelle Fortenberry – ought to be good. It is: the subject of these 176 pages is a three-month period in 1985 when Fox was simultaneously shooting his breakout sitcom role in Family Ties and the career-defining American classic, Back to the Future.

That’s two more-than-full-time jobs for one little guy, necessitating that the then 23-year-old actor work 20-hour days, six days a week. This schedule was only possible because the mid-1980s was a time before showbiz labour laws caught up with basic human decency. These days, we’re told, a standard contract “demands two weeks of buffer time on either side of a job”, while Fox didn’t even get an hour.

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We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir by Anthony Hopkins review – a legend with a temper

The Oscar-winning actor’s autobiography combines vulnerability with bloody mindedness and belligerence

It’s the greatest entrance in movie history – and he doesn’t move a muscle.

FBI rookie Clarice Starling must walk along the row of cells until she reaches Dr Lecter’s reinforced glass tank, where the man himself is simply standing, his face a living skull of satanic malice, eerily immobile in his form-fitting blue prison jumpsuit – immobile, that is, until such time as he launches himself against the glass, making that extraordinary hissing-slavering sound. A billion true-crime documentaries have since revealed that actual serial killers are very boring, with nothing like Anthony Hopkins’s screen presence.

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Bread of Angels: A Memoir, by Patti Smith review – a wild ride with the poet of punk

Smith’s incantatory voice shines through in this surprisingly revelatory follow up to Just Kids and M Train

The post-pandemic flood of artist memoirs continues, but Patti Smith stands apart. The poet who wrote punk into existence before pivoting to pop stardom then ghosting fans to raise a family has, in the 21st century, leaned into literature and music with such vitality it has become hard to say which medium suits her better. It hardly matters. At 78 years old, Smith lives and breathes both.

Her latest memoir follows the tightly focused coming-of-age story Just Kids, published to great acclaim in 2010, and 2015’s more ruminative M Train. Bread of Angels splits the difference to create a more conventional autobiography. It could be described as Just Kids’ prequel and sequel, moving from Smith’s hardscrabble childhood to the near-present, where a striking twist takes the narrative back to her literal conception. It’s one of a number of revelations about an artist whose story would otherwise seem, by now, well-chiseled into the tablets of rock history.

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‘Ambition is a punishing sphere for women’: author Maggie Nelson on why Taylor Swift is the Sylvia Plath of her generation

What do Swift and Plath have in common, and should Kamala Harris have spoken out about her political ambitions? The Argonauts author turns her lens on poetry, pop and patriarchy

Maggie Nelson is an unapologetic Taylor Swift fan. She knows the discography, drops song lyrics into conversation and tells me she took her family to the Vancouver leg of the Eras tour. So she’s a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie? Nelson seems not entirely comfortable with the breathless connotations of that term but yes, the love is real. So much so, she has written a book about the billionaire singer-songwriter, or rather, a joint analysis of Swift and Sylvia Plath, who recurs in much of Nelson’s oeuvre.

The notion of uniting these two cultural titans, who are seemingly poles apart in sensibility – one a melancholic American poet, the other an all-American poster girl – came to her when she heard Swift’s 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. Alongside its literary references to F Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas and Shakespeare, there are heavy resonances of Plath in its introspection and emotional tumult. But the book only started to take shape after a chat with her 13-year-old son’s friend, Alba. “We were making bracelets and she said ‘Have you ever heard of Sylvia Plath?’ I thought that was funny because I’d written my undergraduate thesis on Plath and I was [almost] 40 years older than her. So I said: ‘I have heard of Sylvia Plath.’ As I sat there, I thought, these kids don’t want to hear me talk on this topic but I have a lot to say because I’ve been thinking of it all.”

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Wings by Paul McCartney review – a brilliant story of post-Beatles revival

A compelling oral history traces the rise one of the most successful bands of the 70s from the ashes of a creative breakup

The Beatles learned how to be Beatles together. From 1963 to 1970, the group’s four members experienced an entirely new kind of fame, while leaning on each other to get through it. After splitting up, they faced another unprecedented challenge: how to be an ex-Beatle? This one had to be confronted alone.

The heaviest burdens of expectation fell on the group’s main songwriters, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who were also suffering from the emotional shock of an acrimonious personal split. Both of them leaned on their wives. As John and Yoko Ono pursued political campaigns and avant-garde art projects, Paul and Linda McCartney retreated with their children to their ramshackle Scottish farm, where Paul licked his wounds, sheared sheep and tinkered with new songs. Paul insisted that Linda become his new musical partner, despite her inexperience. As she said later: “The whole thing started because Paul had nobody to play with. More than anything he wanted a friend near him.” The album he made with her, Ram, sold well but received savage reviews, deepening his crisis of confidence.

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Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood review – the great novelist reveals her hidden side

A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age

Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.

In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.

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Where to start with: Paul Bailey

The novelist and poet, who died a year ago, left a huge body of work distinguished by its melancholy wit and warmth. These are some of the highlights

Paul Bailey, who died last October aged 87, was best known as a novelist of comic brilliance, wide-ranging empathy – even for the worst of his characters – and a cleverness that was never clinical. His fiction was frequently occupied with the impact of memories on our lives, and usually heavily driven by sharp, syncopated dialogue. But he was also a memoirist, poet and more besides – so here’s a guide to the legacy of books he left behind.

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Nobody’s Girl by Virginia Roberts Giuffre review – a devastating exposé of power, corruption and abuse

Giuffre’s posthumously published memoir lays bare the life-wrecking impact of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes – but it is also the story of how a young woman becomes a hero

There is a strand running through Nobody’s Girl – a memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April this year – in which the activist and survivor of Jeffrey Epstein grapples with something more insidious than abuse. “I know it is a lot to take in,” she writes after a gruelling early passage detailing how she was sexually abused as a child. “But please don’t stop reading.” After recounting the first time Epstein allegedly forced her to have sex with one of his billionaire friends, she writes, “I need a breather. I bet you do too.”

Throughout the book, Giuffre beguiles, apologises and cheerfully breaks the fourth wall in an effort to soften the distaste she assumes her story will trigger. Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with the perpetrator over his victims. Epstein hanged himself in prison while awaiting trial in 2019 and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, outcomes largely enabled by Giuffre’s testimony. But it is also a book about how a young woman becomes a hero. And yet here she is, having to charm us out of shrinking from her in horror.

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The Uncool by Cameron Crowe review – inside rock’s wildest decade

From shadowing a cocaine-addled David Bowie to winning over Joni Mitchell, deliciously readable tales from the director of Almost Famous

Cameron Crowe spent his youth being in the right place at the right time. In 1964, aged seven, he was taken by his mother to see “a kid named Bob Dylan” play a local college gym. By the age of 14, living in San Diego, he was writing record reviews for a local underground magazine whose main aim was to bring down Richard Nixon. Shortly after that, he started interviewing the bands of the day as they came through California – first Humble Pie for Creem, and then the Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band and Led Zeppelin for Rolling Stone.

Crowe previously fictionalised his story in the 2000 film Almost Famous, which he wrote and directed. His lyrical and compulsively readable memoir The Uncool is bookended by the opening of a musical version, which coincides with the death of Crowe’s mother Alice whose aphorisms, including “Put some goodness in the world before it blows up”, are scattered throughout the book. Alice insisted that Crowe skip two school grades, driving his precocity; she was also dead against rock’n’roll on account of its unbridled hedonism. When Crowe asks her what Elvis did on The Ed Sullivan Show that was so subversive he had to be filmed from the waist up, she “clinically” replies: “He had an erection”.

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