Fay Weldon, one of England's best-selling and most celebrated
authors, looks back on her life as wife, lover, playwright,
novelist, feminist, antifeminist, and bon vivant in this funny and
engaging memoir. She writes brilliantly about her upbringing in New
Zealand, as young and poor girl in London, as an unmarried mother,
wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, and
winer-and-diner: there is little ground she's failed to cover.
Brought up among women-her intrepid mother, grandmother, and
sister-Weldon found men a mystery until the swinging-sixties London
introduced her to the indecent, the hopeless, and the
golden-footed. A central figure among the Bohemian writers and
artists of the sixties, she has maintained this unique position
through four turbulent decades. An icon to many, a thorn in the
flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or
interest.
Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most
of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her glamorous
father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor role as was
generally absent. Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother
raised her along with her sister, Jane. Weldon's family, it turns
out, has an impressive literary pedigree; her grandfather, Edgar,
Uncle Selwyn and, for a brief while, her mother were all novelists.
Arriving in London from New Zealand, just after the Second World
War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant in
a grand house-the experience of living below stairs later helped
Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs.
After graduating from St. Andrews University, Weldon worked in the
Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying the conventions of
the times, she remained a single parent. She struggled, living in
poverty in post-war London made all the more grinding since she was
trying to maintain respectability. Following a stint at the Daily
Mirror, she drifted into advertising before desperately entering
into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience-a
marriage so dreadful she writes of it in the third person as if
writing about characters in a novel. With cool, unwavering honesty
she details the truly crushing experience of being hitched to a
celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy
West End nightclub. She escapes eventually, and finds true love at
thirty after meeting Ron Weldon at a party. When this union, too,
comes to an end, Fay's packed enough experience into her life to
begin her career as a writer. She develops into a bohemian
intellectual, and works alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David
Wevill and Peter Porter, pens winning advertising slogans, and
truly begins writing seriously. Fay closes her riveting memoir as
she drops what will be her first success, a television play, into a
Regents Park mailbox on her way to the hospital to give birth. The
play will be the first of many triumphs for a writer whose
provocative oeuvre has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.
General
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