Memoir

Tim Franks goes in search of what it means to be Jewish

It’s hard to classify this thought-provoking book – part memoir, part philosophical exploration, but mostly a deeply researched family history. And what a history that is. Tim Franks, born in 1968, has been a BBC reporter for almost two decades, and now presents Newshour on the World Service. So he knows how to tell stories about other people. But the events here concern himself, and many of them are heartbreaking, as he searches for an answer to the question of what comprises identity and to what extent we are products of our ancestors. Franks is descended from rabbis, including one who played a part in keeping Bevis Marks, the oldest

Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press

Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian press has been slowly, methodically strangled, which has forced existential choices on newspaper and TV journalists. Twenty-one have been killed – beaten, poisoned or gunned down. Others, such as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, highly regarded investigative reporters, have been forced into exile. Yet others, like the ‘dear friends’ of this book’s title, have chosen a different path – to cleave ever closer to the regime. The authors tell the fascinating story of those choices and allow us a glimpse of why they were taken. In 2000, Soldatov and Borogan were employed by the political department of the newspaper Izvestiya,

A life among movie stars can damage your health

Mothers of America             let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body                               but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery             images… So wrote Frank O’Hara in ‘Ave Maria’, in 1964. Matthew Specktor is the son of the talent agent Fred Specktor and the writer Katherine McGaffey, whose crushing misadventures in screenwriting seem to him a detour in what could have been a far happier life. His father’s specialism was originally ‘oddballs and misfits’, carting around actors like Jack Nicholson and

Being stalked by a murderer was just one of life’s problems – Sarah Vine

Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise… that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD.

The Spectator letter that marked a turning point in gay history

On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the recommendation of the 1957 Wolfenden Report that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. This had led to the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS) in 1958, and it was for this organisation that the letter’s three signatories worked as volunteers. The letter was both unusual

Haunted by my great-grandfather’s second wife – by Alice Mah

Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival, when the Chinese remember their dead by sweeping their tombs. Mah’s memoir opens here, and we nervously anticipate the tragedy or horror that will surely strike – and are left waiting. Other than the pushiness of Taishanese cousins, who demand ‘red pockets’ (a traditional way of gifting money in small red envelopes) and donations for

Should family history, however painful, be memorialised forever?

Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis’s previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic ‘came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences

‘Sitting the 11-plus was the most momentous event of my life’ – Geoff Dyer

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

Why are publishers such bad judges when it comes to their own memoirs?

‘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

The childhood terrors of Judith Hermann

The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic. First the parodic. The book opens one night in Berlin with Hermann running into the psychotherapist she has been seeing three times a week for ten years. Over the course of these sessions, she recalls, she fell in love, then out of

My obsession with ageing rock stars – by Kate Mossman

‘The older male rock star isn’t just my specialist subject, it’s my obsession,’ admits Kate Mossman in the opening pages of Men of a Certain Age. Over the 15 years she’s spent interviewing ageing rockers such as Sting, Tom Jones, Ray Davies, Glen Campbell and Nick Cave for the Word and the New Statesman, she describes feeling ‘something inside of me ignite… so excited, yet so at ease’. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘that in the presence of a wrinkly rock star twice my age, I sometimes feel like I’m meeting… me?’ Having encountered my share of these guys myself, I know precisely what she means. Rock journalism is a

A David Bowie devotee with the air of Adrian Mole

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

Keith McNally: ‘Still craving the success I pretend to despise’

Any of the sizeable audience that the restaurateur Keith McNally – of Balthazar, Minetta Tavern and Pastis fame – has accumulated on Instagram will recognise his appetite for beef. His followers find his attacks on people from James Corden to Michael Palin equally delicious. He tried it with me, too, and launched a series of salvos, despite my admiration of his early game-changing NYC restaurants. Not only was I a corrupt food critic, I was comparable to Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin. So the idea of reviewing his memoir was clearly tempting – revenge served cold kinda thing. But McNally’s very first sentence outlines his plans to kill himself in

The grooming of teenaged Linn Ullmann

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

A cremation caper: Stealing Dad, by Sofka Zinovieff, reviewed

Sophocles’s Antigone is a battle over the burial of a body and the war between law and divinity. What rules – the decree of a king or conscience? This is the crux of Sofka Zinovieff’s Stealing Dad. When Alekos, a Greek sculptor, is struck down in 2018 by a heart attack and drowns in a London canal, he leaves behind not just a spiky widow, Heather, but seven children and five colourful ex-wives. The children find it hard to imagine that his death could be so mundane: more fitting would have been ‘swimming the Hellespont or shredded by sharks’. Alekos is a ‘Zorba-like figure’ whose selfishness has caused chaos: ‘the

Cooking up a storm of memories – Bee Wilson’s kitchenalia

When Bee Wilson’s husband abruptly called time on their 23-year marriage, she was left with a house full of memories embedded in the everyday objects around her. Two months after his departure, the heart-shaped tin of the title – in which she’d baked their wedding cake – clattered to the floor for no apparent reason. Symbolic or what? That leap inspired another, sending Wilson on a quest to explore our relationship to objects, specifically kitchenalia. After years of use, all possessions hold symbolic memories and actual DNA, and kitchen tools are handled more than most household items, from wooden spoons and cooking pans to salt shakers and china. And, she

The satisfaction of making wine the hard way

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

The enduring lure of Atlantis

When you picture Atlantis, what do you see? For most people, this mythic city is a classical arcadia sunk beneath the sea – fallen columns, shattered arches and perhaps even an aqueduct. But that is not the place described by Plato, the original source of the Atlantis myth. His version consists of an immense Atlantic island, many millennia older than the Egyptian and Babylonian empires. The popular image of Atlantis was created by Jules Verne in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. When that novel’s narrator, Professor Pierre Aronnax, joins Captain Nemo on his underwater exploration, they encounter a ruined city. He notices temples and even ‘the floating outline of

‘I felt offended on behalf of my breasts’ – Jean Hannah Edelstein

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,

Petty, malicious and tremendous fun – the Facebook office drama

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