A Life of My Own: A Memoir

An astonishing (to me) autobiography. Claire Tomalin moved in considerably more literary circles than I could have ever imagined. She socialised and worked with large parts of literary London and mentions them casually - certainly not name-dropping. Her personal life had more than its fair share of tragedy - her parents divorced when she was still a child; her own first marriage was difficult and ended in early widowhood; of her five children one died as a baby, one committed suicide as a young adult and one is handicapped by spina bifida. During all this she researched and wrote biographies, including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys etc and edited literary magazines and newspapers.

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-life-of-my-own-by-claire-tomalin/

I have previously hugely enjoyed Tomalin’s biographies of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the young H.G. Wells, so I had pretty high hopes for this autobiography, published in 2017 when she was already 84 (she turned 90 in June). And it pretty much fulfilled them.

Tomalin is the daughter of an English musician and a French writer, who married too young and were already on the verge of separation when she was conceived. She too married young, finding a journalist chap while a student at Cambridge, and the relationship deteriorated into on-again-off-again until he was killed covering the Yom Kippur war, exactly fifty years ago last month. But they had show more five children, two of who died, one as a baby, the other in her early 20s; and their surviving son has a serious disability. She tells us much less about her second husband, Michael Frayn, which is a little disappointing. But there is still plenty of personal material to draw on, with her literary endeavours a secondary theme. The hilarious contact lens scene from Noises Off was inspired by something that actually happened to Tomalin while on holiday with Frayn.

Writing of her time at Cambridge, she says that she gave up writing poetry because she felt she was not good enough at it; but this “left an emptiness in my life which has never quite been filled.” I find that rather sad. Her biographies are superlative, but I guess she feels that there was something more creative that was possible and that she missed out on. There is still time. show less

Acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin has lived a meaningful life with no shortage of experiences, some unfortunately tragic. I really enjoyed following her in the oftentimes exciting bohemian London life of arts and culture and reading through all her literary pursuits. Overall I would describe the account as a bit insipid. This however does not take away from her admirable strength and personality in leading a "life of her own", even when faced with adversity.

Literary biographer Claire Tomalin considers her own story in her memoir A Life of My Own. As she explains in the introduction, she pieced the narrative together in part by going through her old datebooks, and unfortunately, this choice of sources shows. Tomalin lists a lot of friends, lovers, relatives, and colleagues, as well as many lunches, parties, and other get-togethers with them, but none of these connections are characterized with any depth. Moreover, the narrative feels distant even when Tomalin is describing scenes of heavy emotional import, such as the deaths of her husband and two of her children. My high hopes for this book after listening to a memorable interview with the author on NPR in 2018 were not fulfilled.

Although there were a few slow spots in this memoir, I found this woman's life inspiring. She overcame a number of personal setbacks and difficulties to have an engaging and full intellectual life.

Excellent - read it in a sitting