Category Autobiography and memoir

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Night People by Mark Ronson review – a superstar DJ’s coming of age

Nerdery triumphs over gossip in this earnest but compelling memoir of the 90s New York club scene

It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.

Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.

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Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang review – a daughter of China speaks again

The bestselling author returns with an account of how her homeland has changed – and the personal costs of fame

Remarkable success notoriously brings its own problems. Wild Swans, first published in 1991 and written by Jung Chang with the help of her husband, Irish-born historian and writer Jon Halliday, had a global impact few authors dare to dream of. It told the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China – Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself – and became one of the most popular nonfiction books in history, selling more than 13m copies in 37 languages and collecting a fistful of awards and commendations. For any author, following that would be a challenge. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang’s own departure from China in 1978, and revisiting episodes from the earlier work with added detail.

Wild Swans was Chang’s second book: her first was a biography of Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the early 20th-century revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which, she volunteers, had deservedly little impact. Wild Swans was different: animated by a powerful family story, set against the dramatic political background of war and revolution and enlivened by Halliday’s formidable narrative talent, it was an instant hit.

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Wainwright prize for nature writing awarded to memoir about raising a hare during lockdown

Debut author Chloe Dalton’s ‘dream-like’ book Raising Hare follows the writer from London to the countryside

A memoir about a woman who rescued a hare during the pandemic has won this year’s Wainwright prize book of the year.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton follows the author from London to the countryside, where she looked after a leveret during lockdown.

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From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn

Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights

Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.

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Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy review – brave and absorbing

In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother

Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.”

Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects – the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing – can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (“She was my shelter and my storm,” writes Roy). It is through loving and depending on the mysterious and incomprehensible that we come to “tolerate”, even embrace, the strangest thing of all: life itself.

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A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews review – a memoir of great scope and intimacy

A meditation on loss, literature and the unspoken, from one of Canada’s most admired writers

Asking himself “Why I write”, George Orwell gave four reasons: aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, political purpose and sheer egoism. Asked the same question ahead of a literary conference in Mexico City, Miriam Toews mentions the teenage letters she sent from Europe to her sister Marjorie (Marj or M as she calls her) as the reason she became a writer. Sorry, that won’t do for an answer, she’s told. Try again.

In a frenetic household set-up in Toronto, keeping an eye on her mother one moment, entertaining her grandchildren the next and warding off angry neighbours in between, she struggles to get her act together and makes a to-do list: “Wind Museum. Deranged skunk. North-west quadrant with ex. Conversación in Mexico City.” The skunk has distemper and keeps getting trapped in the window well. The Wind Museum is the collection she’d love to create, commemorating winds from all over the world (Harmattan, Calima, Mistral, Sirocco etc), if she can find a way to exhibit them. The ex is the father of her second child, who despite years of separation is still taking the royalties on her work – it’s time to meet him and end that arrangement.

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Plot Twist: I am related to the real-life Oliver

Oliver Twist is one of the author’s best known creations. But for Nicholas Blincoe, the story is much closer to home. He reveals an astonishing family history

For almost my entire life, I’ve known there’s a connection between my family and Oliver Twist. There’s little chance I could forget it. Charles Dickens’s story has exploded into an Oliver multimedia universe, with as many as a hundred screen adaptations, the brilliant Lionel Bart musical, two current TV shows based on the frenmity of Fagin and the Artful Dodger, and an Audible dramatisation starring Brian Cox and Daniel Kaluuya.

I remember one Easter Sunday we were watching Oliver! on TV when my father snapped out of his post-lunch stupor to announce: “Oliver Twist was a Blincoe. He’s my great-great-grandfather.” The original Robert Blincoe was a foundling, abandoned in London’s St Pancras district in around 1792. He spent his early years in the care of the parish, entering the workhouse at four years old. By seven, he was one of 30 “parish apprentices” contracted to work in a Nottinghamshire cotton mill without pay until the age of 21. London’s parish councils shipped thousands of pauper children north between the 1790s and 1830s, but little was known of their lives until Robert’s memoir. His account of brutality, sadism, sexual abuse and starvation became a national sensation, running to five editions between 1828 and 1833.

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The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus review – growing up between two worlds

The poet’s moving exploration of deafness, difference and identity

Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother’s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds – lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he’s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as “missing sound” in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, “suspicious” as “spacious” – words with problematically different meanings.

If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of “audism” can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for what his ears do not pick up.

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Frankly by Nicola Sturgeon review – the ex-first minister opens up

Scotland’s former leader addresses conflict with Salmond and rumours of a lesbian affair, but stops short of full disclosure

When the title of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, was first announced, I had my doubts. Partly, of course, it was a touching nod to her late friend, the comic Janey Godley. Godley’s viral Twitter voiceovers of the first minister of Scotland’s press conferences always ended with the catchphrase: “Frank, get the door!”

As a reporter covering her decade in power, however, I’d always found her to be a master of the lengthy, lawyerly obfuscation and the disarming but consequence-free apology. Would she really engage with the questions that overshadowed the final years of her leadership until her shock resignation in 2023? Questions about Alex Salmond’s sexual harassment investigation, the Scottish government’s secrecy during the pandemic, the toxic legacy of her gender recognition reforms, the stalled delivery of some of her flagship policy pledges, not to mention independence itself. And what about that rumoured lesbian affair?

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The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy millieu

AC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.

Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly unrivalled portrait of the age. Many believe that he did: one review of these two edited volumes declares that because of them, he has entered “the diarists’ pantheon”.

Zsa Zsa Gabor once remarked that Britain was a country of boys and old boys: this is a book for the old boys

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