3 Review(s)

Perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation. Martin Amis has been the object of obsessive media scrutiny for much of his career. In this much anticipated memoir, he writes with striking candour about his life and, in the process, gives us a clear view of the 'geography of the writer's mind'. The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed twenty years later from the basement of Frederick West, one of Britain's most prolific serial murderers. Inevitably too, the memoir records the changing literacy scene in Britain and the United States, including a wealth of anecdotes along with memorable penportraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves and Elizabeth Jane Howard among others. The result is a remarkable work of autobiography-profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest. As a writer's self-portrait, it is destined to become a classic.