Category Autobiography and memoir

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Rumours of My Demise by Evan Dando review – eye-popping tales of drugs and unpredictability

An indie-pop darling details his rise to fame and subsequent public humiliations with appealing frankness

Evan Dando’s autobiography opens in early 2021. The singer is living in a mouldering trailer on Martha’s Vineyard. He has a $200-a-day drug habit and is subsisting off a diet of cigarettes and cheeseburgers that he can’t chew because the heroin, cocaine and amphetamine he’s injecting have caused his teeth to fall out.

It’s all a very long way from Dando’s brief burst of fame as frontman and solitary longstanding member of the Lemonheads: two big albums in 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray, and 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads, a huge hit cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Mrs Robinson, an era with Dando’s face taking its place alongside the Betty Blue and magic eye posters on halls of residence walls, the Docs-shod female student’s pin-up of choice. But it’s also not totally unexpected, at least if you have even a glancing knowledge of the singer’s subsequent travails. Mainstream success was short-lived: Dando succeeds in sabotaging his own career in a blaze of hard drugs and wildly unpredictable behaviour. For the last 35 years, drugs and unpredictability – rather than music – is what Dando has become known for. The book’s blurb mentions “heroin chic”, but in truth, Dando’s dissipation is almost impossible to put any kind of romantic gloss on. To his credit, he doesn’t bother, instead recounting one public humiliation after another with a what-can-you-do? shrug.

A cocktail of heroin and cocaine puts paid to a show designed to impress investors who’ve just bought a share of Dando’s song publishing for $300,000, but it’s just one of many gigs that collapse into chaos: he falls offstage, or the police are called and he’s led away from the venue in handcuffs. The Lemonheads miss their slot at Glastonbury because Dando is holed up in a hotel, doing heroin: when he does eventually turn up, he performs an unscheduled solo set, but the crowd throw bottles and boo him offstage. He hangs around Oasis in their pomp, even writing a song with Noel Gallagher: it has to be removed from a Lemonheads album at the last minute, because Gallagher deems it an “embarrassment”.

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‘I wanted to write more than I wanted to have children’: author Sarah Perry on rejecting motherhood

When the novelist was faced with the decision of whether to pursue fertility treatment or focus on her career, her literary ambitions kicked in

Fifteen years ago, having said all my life that I never wanted a baby, that I couldn’t fathom why any free woman would do such a thing to her body and her mind, I suddenly and passionately wanted a child. I remember where I was when this feeling, so heretical to me, arrived: it was early morning in London, and having come down Fleet Street on my way to work, I was standing at the till of a newsagents to pay for a Diet Coke, a flapjack and a pack of Silk Cut. There were no children there and no pregnant women; nothing had been said or done to change my mind. It had simply landed on me, and more or less immediately – because I’ve never known how to control an impulse, and because I was 30, which seemed to me then a great age – my husband, Robert, and I set about trying to have a child.

When for some months nothing happened, I turned to the websites where women who’ve never met scrutinise their bodies for signs of pregnancy or fertility or miscarriage, and my vocabulary changed. I became able to communicate in acronyms impenetrable to anyone who hadn’t held a dozen ovulation sticks in a dozen urine streams, and it is all so long ago now that I only remember one: 2WW. At first I took this to be some dry reference to the second world war, since they did seem to be always in battle, these women, or in flight – but in fact it refers to the “two-week wait”, the fearful, hopeful days between sex and ovulation, and the first signs the uterus had succeeded or failed (that these signs can be identical sometimes invokes a kind of madness, to which I also briefly succumbed).

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‘I’m going to write about all of it’: author Chris Kraus on success, drugs and I Love Dick

A decade after her debut became a cult hit, the US author talks about the true crime that inspired her latest novel, #MeToo overreach and being married to an addict

Chris Kraus regards the late success of her first book, I Love Dick, with ambivalence. A work of autofiction, first published in 1997, it chronicles Kraus’s infatuation with a cultural theorist named Dick, a doomed, one-sided love affair that nonetheless pulls Kraus, a depressed, 39-year-old failing film-maker languishing in a sexless marriage, out of her personal and artistic rut. After a slow start, the book became a cult classic and in 2016 it was made into an Amazon Prime Video TV series, with Kraus played by Kathryn Hahn. “To me, success would have been like a long review in the New York Review of Books, not being a character on a sitcom,” Kraus says now. Her commercial success was a financial boon, of course. “But who can stand by a book they wrote 20 years ago? It was massively embarrassing to go out and support the book as if I’d written it last year.”

She had, however, promised herself that if she ever achieved mainstream success she would write about it with the same candour that she brought to her struggles. “I’m going to write about all of it. Not just about youth, but about middle age,” she says. “Middle age is so much harder to write about, because youth is kind of like a trope. We’re very familiar with reading books about the aspirations or disappointed aspirations of youth, but middle age is much crazier ground. It’s not as sexy, it’s not as familiar. So, to write about middle age in the same way takes commitment.”

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Raise Your Soul by Yanis Varoufakis review – an intimate history of Greece

The colourful former minister uses the lives of five female relatives to tell the story of postwar Greek politics

Yanis Varoufakis entered public consciousness as the academic in a leather jacket who briefly became Greece’s finance minister in 2015. For having the temerity to lecture his creditors on the folly of austerity, he was treated as the villain of the piece. Yet for all his swagger, he has always been a surprisingly sober thinker: Keynesian at heart, internationalist in instinct, he has built a reputation as a critic of dollar hegemony and Fortress Europe, a defender of both the precariat and refugees. You wonder if he’s experienced some schadenfreude in watching Germany’s economic miracle go bad of late – an implosion largely brought about by administering to itself the austerian medicine it once prescribed to the Greeks.

His latest book, the 10th since 2010, departs from his usual sober fare. This time, he offers a collective portrait of five unyielding women in his life who, in their different ways, thumbed their noses at patriarchy and autocracy. Written after thugs beat him up in 2023 in what he described as a “brazen fascist attack”, this is a therapeutic enterprise that doubles as a counter-history of postwar Greece.

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Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry review – a brilliant meditation on mortality

The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely

The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.

It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.

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‘There was comedy at all times’: Andrew O’Hagan on 15 years of funny, frank and champagne-fuelled friendship with Edna O’Brien

In the last decades of her life, the two novelists became close friends. He recalls their intense bond, their last trip to Ireland and her memories of being romanced by Richard Burton

I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. There had been a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was running late, so I put up my hand for a taxi and a rumbling black cab drew to a halt. The door swung open and Edna stepped on to the pavement like Ophelia out of the weedy brook. She was a vision in black velvet and volumised hair. She paid at the window, clearly irked after some altercation with the driver, and when she turned she immediately took my hand and offered a Joycean, or possibly a Glaswegian, effusion.

“I fucking hate the English. Do you?”

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Cat On The Road To Findout by Yusuf/Cat Stevens review – fame, faith and charity

The enigmatic singer-songwriter on pop stardom, becoming a Muslim and returning to the stage decades later

When Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and announced his conversion to the Muslim faith and retirement from music in the late 70s, Bob Dylan apparently remarked that he had “finally stopped trying to be the prophet and begun to follow The Prophet”. It’s a quote that Islam reproduces in his autobiography, viewing it as a benediction, but it also tells you something about the music that made him globally famous.

In the early 70s, the charts were awash with sensitive folky singer-songwriters. Their constituency, as Islam perceptively notes, was “the college generation, away from home, lonely and trying to find their place in the university of high academic expectations”. But none were as obsessed with spirituality as Cat Stevens, with his album titles that namechecked Buddha or referenced Zen poems, his conceptual song cycles based on numerology, his lyrical exhortations to “kick out the devil” and “get to heaven, get a guide”, and Morning Has Broken, the hymn he made a 1972 US No 1. If you’d had to place bets on which 70s superstar would pack it all in for religion, you’d have got far lower odds on Cat Stevens than, say, Noddy Holder.

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‘A resistance to AI’: The author inviting readers to contribute to a mass memoir

Richard Beard says he’s got ‘better at telling the truth’ by arranging his life story on a grid – and invites others to do the same

Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build.

Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard’s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He’s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the “board” as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight’s L-shaped ambulation.

Contributions to The Universal Turing Machine can be made at universalturingmachine.co.uk

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107 Days by Kamala Harris review – no closure, no hope

The former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood

Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.

No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.

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