Spectacles: A Memoir

I'm never sure with these celebrity memoirs whether I will like them or not but from page 1 I could just hear Sue Perkins' voice and I found it absolutely hilarious. Her tales of childhood are particularly funny but it's also interesting to read about her career and relationships. Highly recommended for a good laugh out loud.

A friend's recommendation, the fantastic cover, and a short excerpt convinced me to request this book through ILL, and I enjoyed it very much. It's not terribly cohesive, but it does sort of a follow a "my life up to now" framework, from childhood to university to her early career in comedy with Melanie Giedroyc at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and elsewhere. There are bits about her romantic life, her friendship with Mel and others, her family, her beloved dogs, and some of the more recent TV work she's done, including a not-long-enough bit about the Great British Bake-Off. I laughed out loud more than once.

Quotes

On going through everything saved from her childhood: "Sometimes we don't want to be tethered to yesterday. It's nicer to show more forget. Maybe the gaps in our memory are there for a reason, evolutionary perhaps, to give us the space to grow, to get away from childishness or childish things. Or maybe it's so we have the chance to invent, or at least include, some magic in our yesterdays. Surely the consolation of getting older, of moving away from youth, is that we can shape our past to our fantasies." (14)

On being told not to study English at university: "I've never really responded to peer pressure. What I do respond to, however, is someone categorically telling me I can't do something. I trill at the sound of a gauntlet going down. It feels like a dare. And I've never been able to resist a dare." (94) show less

Very readable and entertaining bio, and all the way through I could hear Sue's voice as I read on.
Halfway, it stepped up a notch, Sue's nearly missed appearance at her brother's wedding (which had me in fits of giggling) to the sdad loss of her beloved dog, Pickle, which left me rather tearful.

A curate's egg-ish kind of autobiography, which I might have preferred read out loud, by Sue Perkins herself. It's written in an engaging, chatty style, which can be funny, and can be moving and touching too. But too often she goes for the obvious laughs, and sometimes she seems to lose direction and narrative. A perfectly pleasant read, but I couldn't quite get to the end of it before I was forced to leave it behind, unfinished. And really, I didn't much mind at all.

I don't think this book has been published in the US, so I had to order it from a British bookseller (affordable copies are available on ABE, Alibris, Amazon, etc.). I knew Sue Perkins only from a British TV series I had stumbled across (*not* the Great British Baking Show, which I started watching only after I read Sue's book), and I knew absolutely nothing about her -- but I wanted to, so I tracked down this book (a bestseller in the UK). Very enjoyable read -- she has a distinctive voice and a friendly, self-effacing style. Most Americans have no idea that Mel Giedroyc (also from the GBBS) is her longtime comedy partner. In fact, most Americans know nothing about Sue Perkins at ALL. Remedy that by reading this honest and amusing show more autobiography. show less

Funny, sad, honest and open as you can possibly be, the audio of this was recorded by Sue - so this is her story, in her voice. Highly recommended.

I loved listening to Sue tell her story. I laughed and cried. She comes over as a person I'd get on with. you go Sue xx