Stories I Only Tell My Friends

I'm not usually a great reader of celebrity biographies, but when I saw this Rob Lowe autobiography on the sale trolley at the local library, I felt it was worth shelling out the two bucks. I'm a bit of a fan of Rob Lowe; the family are in the middle of a West Wing re-watch, in which he stars as Sam Seaborn, and I'm comfort-watching Parks and Rec, in which he's extremely funny as super-fit and positive Chris Traeger. Also my daughter made me watch Bad Influence, an eighties movie in which he plays a villain who uses a sex tape to bring down his hapless victim, and which unfortunately came out at the same time as Lowe himself was the focus of a sex tape scandal (which almost permanently ruined his career).

It's hard not to feel some sympathy for the young Lowe, who was in his early twenties when the sex tape scandal occurred, and who'd been making movies since he was fifteen, but without anyone to provide him any wisdom or guidance. Young men aren't known for their sage judgement, and Lowe shows compassion for his younger self and his over-indulgence in girls and alcohol. Interestingly, he describes himself as being a giant nerd at school, which is sweet, and he lost his head when he suddenly found himself a member of the coolest gang in town.

What saved him was meeting his grounded and sensible wife, Sheryl, and going to rehab. He's still married and sober till this day, which in itself is pretty impressive. I love the way he turned himself into a comedy star, from being a very pretty heartthrob and a serious dramatic actor. Stories I Only Tell My Friends is predictably packed with celebrity anecdotes: he was high school mates with Emilio and Charlie Sheen, he dated Melissa Gilbert and Princess Stephanie... But Rob Lowe is genuinely fun to hang out with, all by himself.
 

Light and Shadow

Mark Colvin was a veteran ABC journalist who died in 2017, about a year after this autobiography was published. Sadly we never got to read the second volume he hinted at in this book. It doesn't seem like nearly ten years since he died; I well remember his mellifluous tones on Radio National.

The subtitle of Light and Shadow is Memoirs of a Spy's Son; clearly the publisher felt this was the strongest hook to draw people in, and it is a fascinating element of Colvin's story. His mother was Australian, his father English, and it was confirmed when Mark was an adult that John Colvin was actually an agent for SIS (MI6). John's most exotic postings (under cover of being a diplomat) were to North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and Ulan Bator in Mongolia to keep an eye on the border between China and Russia at the height of the Cold War. (It was while young Mark was visiting his father during this time that he was given the information about the death of Lin Biao who significance he totally failed to realise!)

But Mark's own life also makes a gripping narrative. He fell into journalism at a young age, worked at Double J when it was just starting up, covered wars in Iraq and the Whitlam crisis, started The World Today and for many years hosted the evening current affairs show PM. It was a remarkable career and his family background, which he kept secret, made it all the more dangerous -- he'd been warned by his father never to visit Russia, for example (though he did). Light and Shadow is a thoroughly absorbing and informative read, one of those unknown gems that you pick up sometimes and provide rich rewards.
 

Wild Swans

I am extremely late to the party on Jung Chang's international bestseller from 1991, Wild Swans. If you've been living under a rock for the last thirty years, Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women living in China through the tumultuous decades of the twentieth century. Jung Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine; her mother was a dedicated Communist Party official; and Jung herself eventually studied English and emigrated to the UK.

Wild Swans has been a school text almost from the moment it was published. My younger daughter used it in studying Revolutions and the copy I've been reading is hers. My ignorance of China's history is shamefully almost total, and Wild Swans filled in quite a few blanks for me. I vaguely knew about the Cultural Revolution, but not quite what a horrific period it was, nor the extent of the arbitrary violence and cruelty it unleashed. The tides of being in and out of favour washed Chang's family to and fro; sometimes they enjoyed quite a lot of privilege, sometimes things were absolutely desperate.

For me, Wild Swans started slowly and it took me a while to become captured by the story. The book really came alive for me when Jung Chang herself appeared, and I sometimes found the parts about the internal machinations of the Communist Party head-spinning. However, I was excited when simultaneously reading Mark Colvin's autobiography, Light and Shadow, to come across a section when Colvin was travelling through China in the early 1970s and he was told about the death of important general Lin Biao -- a very deliberate piece of information-planting whose significance young Colvin completely failed to recognise! Thanks to Wild Swans, I already knew the background story of Lin Biao, so this story meant much more than it would have otherwise.

 

Jilya

I can't remember where I heard about Tracy Westerman's book Jilya -- I think I might have seen a mention of it on Facebook (sometimes it is useful for some things!) Published in 2024, it's subtitled How one Indigenous woman from the remote Pilbara transformed psychology, and it is concerned with two of my favourite areas of interest: psychology and First Nations culture.

Jilya means 'my child,' and Westerman's focus is squarely on Aboriginal child suicides. The rates of children taking their own lives, especially in remote or disadvantaged First Nations communities, are truly horrific, and should be a huge mental health priority. Westerman has zeroed in on the shortage of psychological supports in these areas as a primary factor, as well as multi-generational trauma and multi-generational difficulties in forming secure childhood attachment.

Jilya outlines some fascinating differences between mainstream Western assumptions and Aboriginal culture -- for example, Aboriginal child-rearing practices that might look like 'neglect' to white, middle class social workers. There is a lot in this book about trauma, including everyday racism, deep grief and loss, and the legacy of familial disruption -- such a heavy burden for individuals, let alone whole communities to bear. But Jilya is also the story of Westerman's own life, and her decades of struggle to establish better data collection and protocols for dealing with Aboriginal communities. There is another whole story there about politics, trying to run a private business, and philanthropy, which I won't begin to try to untangle.

I found the middle sections of the book, about applying specific techniques and practices to First Nations individuals, families and communities, the most compelling, but the whole of Jilya is a riveting and powerful read. More power to Tracy Westerman's arm -- she is accomplishing some amazing work.
 

Becoming Myself

I've long been a fan of American psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, especially his two wise books about coming to term with death, Creatures of a Day and Staring at the Sun. In Becoming Myself, Yalom recounts his life story, and it's just as insightful, compassionate and insightful as his writing about his therapy clients (I haven't yet read Yalom's long fiction, but Becoming Myself has piqued my curiosity).

In many ways, and he admits this himself, Yalom has had a blessed life. He married his soul mate, Marilyn, early, they have four healthy children, he has taught and written and seen clients for many decades, he has travelled all over the world and spoken to huge and adoring audiences, and espeically in latter years, he has enjoyed enormous acclaim and popularity. At the time of writing Becoming Myself, he was 86; he's now 94 and still with us.

Yalom is cheerfully candid about his own luck and his failings and regrets -- he allowed Marilyn to shoulder the bulk of child rearing, though she's had a demanding academic career of her own; he made mistakes in handling some patients; he wishes he'd had more empathy toward his difficult mother. He freely discusses taking marijuana, opium, LSD and ecstasy, which didn't shock but did surprise me. He is such an engaging writer and so open about his experiences, Becoming Myself was a thoroughly enjoyable read. Next I'm going to read A Matter of Death and Life, written a few years later by Irvin and Marilyn together, after Marilyn's diagnosis of terminal cancer. Yalom is frank about his fear of losing Marilyn, and I wonder how they handled it together.

Fishing in the Styx

 Ruth Park's second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (great title), picks up where the first left off, after her arrival from New Zealand to Australia in the middle of the Second World War and her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. The two managed to scratch out a living, against everyone's predictions, as full time writers, chiefly by never saying no to a commission and by entering every prize going. Park wrote thousands of radio scripts for children as well as the award-winning novel, The Harp in the South, informed by her own experience living in the slums of Surry Hills. I didn't realise that this book had been so hugely controversial at the time, with Park herself being publicly vilified for daring to write on such a topic. She (probably correctly) deduced that she attracted particular vitriol for being a) female and b) a foreigner. She went on to write many more books over several genres, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult.

Park and Niland's struggles are very moving and quite relatable to any working author! Still, they had five children and lived in various houses, occasionally travelling back to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and Park tells a beautiful and mysterious story of a visitation at the moment when her father died. Niland was haunted by a heart complaint which caused his own death at just 50, leaving her a widow with five half-grown children and a weighty burden of grief. Not surprisingly, the rest of her life was shaped by this terrible loss. She never remarried.

Fishing in the Styx is in some ways much sadder to read than A Fence Around the Cuckoo, but it's also the joyous story of a creative couple who never failed to support and encourage each other, even though Niland did do some characteristically male things, like claim the dining table as his work space without considering where Park might do her writing (the answer, predictably, was on her lap). My God, they worked so hard! This book was published in 1993, but Park lived until 2010, when she was 93, after a long, productive and richly lived life.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo

Ruth Park's two volume autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, has been on my radar for a while -- as with any very popular books, they keep popping up on Brotherhood Books. Is Ruth Park an under-rated author? Unusually, she was extremely successful in three strands of fiction. Her children's books about The Muddleheaded Wombat were huge favourites of my kids (though I never read them myself as a child); her young adult book, Playing Beatie Bow, was possibly the seminal Australian time slip story; and I studied at least one of her adult novels, Poor Man's Orange, in Year 9 at high school (I wonder why they didn't choose the first book about the Darcy family, A Harp in the South? The prequel, Missus, wasn't published until after I'd left school.)

Anyway, to those achievements we can add autobiography, because A Fence Around the Cuckoo is a tremendous piece of writing. It covers Park's childhood in the New Zealand bush, her family's struggles during the Great Depression, and her first jobs in journalism before she emigrated to Australia in 1942. From Park's account, the Depression hit New Zealand slightly less hard than it hit Australia, but it hit hard all the same. It was sobering to read about the same era as Weevils in the Flour from the perspective of one family. The Depression must have left psychological wounds just as deep as the two wars, at least on the poor, and yet it's rarely discussed -- I guess it was less dramatic.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo ends with Park's arrival in Australia, greeted by her pen friend D'arcy Niland, who was to become her husband. I gather Fishing in the Styx picks up where this volume leaves off, and I cannot wait to read it.

Look Back With Gratitude

The final volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Gratitude, is the only one not available from the Athenaeum library, so I took the liberty of buying myself a copy as a Christmas present. Gratitude covers what might be called 'the American years.' Smith's partner, later husband, Alec Beesley, was a conscientious objector, and when World War II broke out, they decided to stay in the United States so that he would escape imprisonment (this became complicated later in the war, when the US joined the fight and Alec faced even more stringent rules around conscientious objection). This was not a decision taken lightly; Smith was horribly homesick and was tormented with guilt about missing out on her country's wartime sufferings. Then, when the war ended, neither could face the prospect of quarantining their three beloved Dalmatians for six months (journalists found this difficult to believe, but it was true!)

Smith's income was erratic; she earned huge chunks of money consulting on screenplays, but the last section of the book is largely concerned with the failure of her play, Letter From Paris, in London after the war. It sounds absolutely agonising, juggling cast, director, set designer, producer -- it made me realise how many elements need to gel to produce a theatrical hit and just how chancy it can be. 

It's been so odd reading these memoirs; my conception of Dodie Smith is as a fiction writer first and foremost (and Gratitude also deals with the writing of I Capture the Castle), but clearly she saw herself as principally a playwright. I have never seen or read a single one of her plays and have no idea if she was actually any good or not (I mean, she must have been, she was popular in her time and made a good living from it). Yet all those plays she fretted over and which so consumed her energies have largely vanished without a trace.

Gratitude ends with Dodie, Alec and the dogs returning to live in England in 1953, she says hopefully forever, and I think it was.

Look Back With Astonishment

This third volume of Dodie Smith's autobiography, Look Back With Astonishment, picks up exactly where volume two left off, with Smith walking through the doors of Heal's furniture store (still going strong today) to take up a position as a shop girl, running the Little Gallery (toys and pictures), a job she would keep for the next decade after giving up on her acting career. She did not, however, give up on the theatre, because this book also covers her years as a tremendously successful playwright.

Anyone who has worked a day job while simultaneously pursuing a creative life will bristle at the headlines Smith attracted with her first successful script: 'Shop Girl Writes Play' -- as if she were a monkey playing with a typewriter! Gradually Smith's hours at Heal's taper off as she devotes more time to writing. She is very coy about her affair with 'Oliver,' who the attentive reader will immediately guess was in fact Ambrose Heal, her boss, but this affair seems to taper off in similar fashion as she grows more attached to Alec Beesley, her eventual husband. I had no idea that Smith had such a stellar playwriting career, extremely commercially successful and fortunately for her, extremely lucrative.

Look Back With Astonishment ends as war is about to break out, with Smith and Beesley embarking for America, ostensibly to help cast one of her plays in New York, but with an eye to the safety of Beesley, an avowed pacifist (in fact, as a conscientious objector, he probably would have been fine).

The Athenaeum Library doesn't have the fourth volume, Look Back With Gratitude -- to judge from the state of the other three books, it probably fell apart -- but I have ordered it for myself for Christmas. A fifth volume was apparently planned, but never finished, which is a shame. LBWG I think will cover their seven years in the US and the writing of I Capture the Castle, so I'm looking forward to that.

Look Back With Mixed Feelings

I've now discovered that there are actually four volumes in Dodie Smith's delightful autobiography; I think Look Back With Mixed Feelings might be my favourite title, though. This second book in the series covers Smith's late adolescence and early twenties, a period when she was training at 'the Academy' (later better known as RADA) and beginning to make her way in the theatre. You would barely guess that the First World War was going on during these years, and Smith herself admits to feeling guilty for giving the conflict so little thought. Like a typical teenager, she is mostly preoccupied with falling in and out of love and trying to find work. 

Probably the most important event for Smith during these years was the death of her beloved mother. After this, Smith drifted out of her family's orbit, though the band of Manchester uncles were as loving and supportive as ever, often coming to the rescue with badly needed funds. Again, like any young person, Smith turned to her 'Gang' of friends, mostly fellow members of the Three Arts Club, a home from home-cum-boarding house for women artists, writers and actors, which sounds rather like living in college, though I didn't think much of the cheap cubicle option, windowless, with the partitions not even reaching the ground!

There's much discussion of cocoa made on gas rings, theatrical 'digs' with sympathetic landladies, stage mishaps, flitting from one play to another (or, sadly, in Smith's case, not getting work for ages) and it's remarkable to reflect on this vanished world where even in the thick of war, plays were being constantly mounted, toured and even taken to the battlefront. There must have been thousands of people working in the theatre, and of course Noel Streatfeild also spent years in the same milieu (they were almost exactly the same age, I wonder if they ever came across each other?)

I've already nabbed Look Back in Astonishment (another great title) but incredibly, the usually reliable Athenaeum doesn't have the final volume, Look Back With Gratitude. It's just possible I might have a Christmas present on the way...

The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome

 

As regular readers of this blog will be aware, Swallows and Amazons and its many sequels are among my (sometimes problematic) faves; however I did not know very much about their author, Arthur Ransome, of whom the bald, jovial adventurer Uncle Jim Turner in the books is an obvious self-portrait.

So I was very interested to discover this autobiography, written piecemeal and late in life, though it only takes Ransome's story up to 1931 (the remaining thirty-odd years of his life are summarised in a postscript by his younger friend and colleague Rupert Hart-Davies). 

Perhaps Ransome's most intriguing years were those spent as a journalist and researcher of folklore in Russia, before and after the 1918 revolution. He was on intimate terms with many of the major players, including Lenin and Trotsky, and indeed, Trotsky's personal secretary became his second wife. Ransome claims that he was able to become so close to the Bolsheviks because he himself was completely 'unpolitical.' This contention has led to speculation that he was in fact acting as a spy during this period, though naturally there is no discussion of espionage in the autobiography. He and Evgenia made a hair-raising escape to safety into Estonia in the chaos of fighting between White and Red, with Ransome bluffing his way through the front lines and Evgenia riding on the back of a cart (according to other sources, with millions of roubles worth of diamonds smuggled in her petticoats). To be honest, the ins and outs of the revolutionary period, with its shifts in power and double-crosses, were quite hard for me to follow, but it was a good reminder that the narrative of history is difficult to discern at the time of the events -- everything is in chaos, and it's only after the dust has settled that the story becomes clear (and sometimes not even then). Who knows what the established story of our own times will be in a generation or two? The moments that seem crucial to us might end up being insignificant in the broad sweep of history, and perhaps the most important developments are the ones we are not even aware of.

Ten Steps To Nanette

Dear readers, I have been on holiday. I enjoyed a lovely relaxing week with some friends in Cairns, bobbing in the pool in the sunshine, eating delicious food, chatting, playing games, and of course, reading (more on that later). But before I left for my week in the tropical sun, I had a task to complete. I had borrowed Hannah Gadsby's sort-of autobiography, Ten Steps To Nanette, from the Athenaeum Library (are you sick of me talking about that yet??) and it was due back the day after my return from FNQ. So I had to finish it before I left, didn't I?

It was no chore to race through this book, though it is harrowing reading at times. Gadsby is an absolute professional at playing their audience like a fiddle, something they talk about in some detail while describing how they wrote their award-winning, brilliant show Nanette. Gadsby uses some of the same techniques in constructing this narrative, easing us into comfort with some laughs and then, wham, punching us in the solar plexus with horrific memories or a piece of shocking information. Gadsby has wrestled with shame and fear, sexual assault, depression, self-harm, neuro-diversity, and gender identity, as well as poverty, employment issues and then, almost most disorienting of all, global celebrity with the violent success of Nanette, self-described as 'a comedy show that isn't funny.' (If you haven't seen it yet, please, in the time-honoured phrase, do yourself a favour.)

I particularly enjoyed Gadsby's discovery of the history of art and subsequent obsession with the topic as a way of understanding the world. They are obviously extremely intelligent and it's an indictment on our education system that they were allowed to fall through the cracks at school -- more evidence that we need to pay more attention to autism and ADHD in children. I really wanted to reach back in time and give little Hannah a big hug.
 

A House With Four Rooms

Another treasure from the Melbourne Athenaeum Library -- I didn't even know that this book existed. And isn't this first edition pretty! The title is explained at the very end of the book:

Like everyone else I am a house with four rooms. As a child the physical room was barred to me, I had to fight my way to get into it. The room of the mind has always been mine. In the emotional, I have been marvellously lucky; with the spiritual, it was a long time before I would do more than peer in; now it is where I like best to be alone.

All of us tend to inhabit one room more than another but I have tried to go most days into them all -- each has its riches.

My house is, of course, slightly worn now but I still hope to go on quietly living in all of it, finding treasures, old and new until the time comes when I shall have, finally, to shut its door.

Isn't that absolutely beautiful? What a wonderful way to imagine the balance of life. Rumer Godden lived a full and rich and long life (she died in 1998), somehow managing to write dozens of books in between growing up in India, a failed marriage that led to a spartan life in a hut in the Himalayas, raising two daughters, numerous house moves, illness and tragedy (one house burned down and they lost almost everything), speaking tours of the US, several of her novels being turned into films, and other adventures...

Some of the personages she mentions in A House With Four Rooms are not known to me, others I have heard of. I looked up Stanbrook Abbey, the inspiration for perhaps my favourite Godden novel, In This House of Brede, and saw that it's become a hotel -- due to declining numbers, the abbey's sisters relocated to Yorkshire. It sounds (according to Wikipedia) as if the move was painful; three sisters left the abbey and set up their own establishment. It would have made a perfect, agonising plot for another novel.

Beyond the Vicarage

I enjoyed reading Away From the Vicarage so much that I pulled out my copy of Beyond the Vicarage and re-read it immediately. Away From the Vicarage had filled in a few crucial events, and the story picks up straight after the previous volume, with 'Vicky' on her way home from a theatrical tour in Australia after her father's sudden death.

As it deals with 'Vicky's' adult life and career as a writer, Beyond the Vicarage is less packed with amusing incident and anecdote than the earlier books, but the chapters dealing with Streatfield's experiences of WWII in London are filled with fascinating (and sometimes gory) detail. She volunteered at first as a fire warden and then running a mobile canteen, which went around during air raids supplying hot drinks and food to people in shelters -- it's incredible the amount of organisation which was mobilised to put such a service in place. I'm continually amazed at the way the British (and presumably other) governments were able to marshal their resources to plan and proceed with such complex programs (evacuating children, nutrition programs, fire patrols, etc etc), quite apart from the actual effort of fighting the war -- and all without the aid of computer technonlogy, all done with paper and typewriters! Unsurprisingly, it was often women who filled in the gaps. I'd forgotten Streatfeild's account of the 'Housewives' association, who came to the rescue with tea, sandwiches, clothing and counselling when other groups failed.

Noel Streatfeild died in 1986 at the age of 91, when I was at university. I wish I'd written her a fan letter when I had the chance. I never realised how many adult novels she'd written; she never intended to be a children's writer and yet she is one of the most gifted writers for children who ever lived.
 

Away From the Vicarage

A week ago, I did something very exciting -- I joined the Athenaeum Library! (Thank you Kirsty for putting the idea into my head.) I've long been aware that there was a library upstairs in the same building as the Athenaeum Theatre, but I'd never investigated it. It's the library of my dreams -- a perfect combination of second hand bookshop and a library, in that it's stocked with lots of the kinds of books I love to read -- including the middle volume of Noel Streatfeild's thinly-veiled autobiographical trilogy, Away From the Vicarage, which I've never been able to get my hands on. Huzzah!

I'm looking forward to exploring the collection; even on my flying visit to sign up and pay my subscription, I saw at least ten books that I want to borrow immediately.

Away From the Vicarage covers Streatfeild's twenties, which were also conicidentally, the 1920s, which she spent training and working as an actress, quite a scandalous career for a vicar's daughter in the years after WWI. As usual, Streatfeild's prose is conversational, easy and always engaging as she sweeps us through horrible theatrical lodgings, plays of varying quality, extended tours of South Africa and Australia, and always affairs at home, in the very different world of the vicarage. 

I've also been dipping into Francesca Ware's Square Haunting, which deals with the lives of five women who lived at Mecklenburgh Square in Bloomsbury, where Streatfeild lodged, and I realised that Dorothy L Sayers and Noel Streatfeild probably lived close to each other at the same time. I wonder if they ever met? Neither of them thought of themselves as writers at this time, and it's unlikely that their paths crossed then, but I wonder if they ever did?

Becoming

For some reason, it's taken me ages to get around to reading Michelle Obama's autobiography, Becoming; it's been sitting on my To Read pile for about a year. And then when I did start it, I took my time over finishing it, reading a couple of other books in between. This is not because it was hard going: it's totally engaging, warm and energetic -- much as I imagine the former First Lady herself might be.

After the orange fool who succeeded the Obamas in the White House (and horrifically, looks like getting back in there for a second term), it was so heartening to read about a pair of highly intelligent, compassionate and determined people who are driven by the desire to achieve good things for society -- to build stuff, instead of tearing it down or making money for themselves. Michelle grew up in the South Side of Chicago, in a declining neighbourhood; but her family always encouraged her education and she ended up at Harvard before working as a lawyer, which is where she met Barack. Of course these two are massively high achievers, but they also come across as normal people, people you could imagine having dinner with. I could never imagine having dinner with the Narcissist-in-Chief.

I say this book was heartening, but it was also so depressing to think that the reaction of America to Obama's two terms was to elect someone so utterly different in every way, someone so intent on undermining everything that the Obamas had worked for. In the last few pages of the book, Michelle describes looking around at Trump's inauguration ceremony and seeing a sea of pale, male faces -- a contrast to the 'vibrant diversity' of her husband's two inaugurations, and a sign of things to come.

The Joy of the Snow

I've been waiting ages for Girls Gone By to re-issue Elizabeth Goudge's autobiographical memoir, The Joy of the Snow, but it's taken so long, I got fed up and ordered it from World of Books. I knew that I'd read this book before, a long time ago -- maybe in high school? -- because I always remembered one section when Goudge singles out The Valley of Song as one of only three of her own books that she actually loves, even though as she admits it's a rather muddled and peculiar book. But the bit that stuck with me was when she says it was liked by a few children '(and how I adored those children).' I remember feeling so proud and special for being one of those select few, even though Goudge didn't know of my existence!

This is a quiet but lovely book which will mean a lot to Goudge fans but not much to anyone else, I fear. She writes beautifully about her childhood and youth, her parents, and particularly of the places she has lived, each of which has its own atmosphere and beauty and each of which she has used as settings for her novels. The power of Goudge's love of place and nature is deep and spiritual, and it's this that I most respond to as a reader, I think. She also writes very amusingly of how Green Dolphin Country unexpectedly won a major American prize (though she only received a small percentage of the money) and how this good fortune changed her life forever, much to the bemusement of her friends and neighbours. 

Goudge suffered all her life with anxiety and at times depression, and a modern reader wonders whether, with her extreme sensitivity and hatred of change, she may have been neuro-diverse? It was also interesting to read a chapter about ghosts and what Goudge calls 'ESP,' the very day after I'd been to see the play 2.22 A Ghost Story! 

One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg

My younger daughter, who is a big Goodies fan and also a fan of birds, requested this book and now I've read it too. Bill Oddie is best known and loved in Australia as a member of the Goodies, whose program was endlessly repeated in a child friendly slot on the ABC (just before Dr Who) for years and years, so we learned the episodes by heart. In fact as an adult I was somewhat startled to discover quite a few episodes that were not child-friendly at all. In the UK, the Goodies was considered a comedy for adults.

Oddie's autobiography falls into distinct sections. The most fascinating is the first, where he discusses his childhood. His mother 'left' the family when he was a small boy -- she was hospitalised with mental illness for much of Oddie's life, and he never really got to know her at all, finding out some crucial facts only when he took part in Who Do You Think You Are? much later in life. His father was supportive but rather passive, and his grandmother seems, frankly, to have been a horrible woman with plenty of issues of her own. Given Bill's own battles with mental illness, this part of the book is really touching and sad.

His years with the Goodies and later TV work are skimmed over in rather cursory fashion, and then suddenly we are plunged into a real-time crisis, as Oddie slides into a depressive episode in the middle of writing the book. Eventually he pulls out of it, but it's a raw and quite startling interlude. The book ends on what's probably intended as a bright note, as he looks forward to making more wildlife programs (his real passion) and perhaps mastering a computer. However, this made an unexpectedly poignant ending, as I'd already googled and discovered that the year after the completing the book, Oddie was sacked from presenting his beloved wildlife series and ended up hospitalised for depression for most of the following year.

One Flew Into the Cuckoo's Egg is an uneven book, but in its own way, an unexpectedly absorbing one.

This Much is True

Just look at that gorgeous face: twinkly, cheeky, filled with character and verve. And that is just what this autobiography is like, too -- imagine having Miriam sit beside you on the couch and tell stories about her long, fascinating life. But not just stories about famous people, some lovely, some absolute shits (as Miriam herself would say without hesitation), but very personal, reflective details about her life, her family and her experiences. 

As we all know by now, Miriam (I feel I have to call her that, rather than Margolyes) is not afraid of a swear word or two, and these are sprinkled liberally throughout This Much is True, and a number of the anecdotes are frankly sexual, so prudish readers should beware. Having said that, my 86 year old mother and 80 year old mother-in-law both wolfed this book down with enormous relish, so make of that what you will.

Miriam, despite being, as she says, a short fat lesbian, has rarely been out of acting work, and became globally famous as a result of playing Professor Sprout in a couple of Harry Potter films. She began her career in the Cambridge Footlights, where the male members of the troupe treated her appallingly (the only one to apologise in later years was Tim Brooke-Taylor -- I always liked him the best). And I feel proud that this forthright, endlessly curious and adventurous woman has chosen Australia as her home. We are lucky indeed to have her.

Is There Life Outside the Box?

Not long after I read Tabitha Carvan's delightful This is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, what should turn up on Brotherhood Books but this autobiography by my own first obsessive crush. I was introduced to Peter Davison as the charming, rakish vet Tristan Farnon in the 1970s version of All Creatures Great and Small, and when he went on to take over the role of the Doctor in my other obsession, Dr Who, my wildest dreams came true (okay, second wildest dreams -- the wildest would have been if the TARDIS had actually landed in my backyard).

Is There Life Outside the Box? thus refers both to the TARDIS phone box and also to television itself: Davison has worked primarily on British TV for his whole long career. He's currently probably most well known for being David Tennant's father-in-law (DT wrote the introduction). The subtitle, An Actor Despairs, is apparently a play on a famous acting manual, An Actor Prepares, a reference which was totally lost on me but was luckily explained early on.

Davison is an engaging companion, sharing some well worn acting anecdotes, some more surprising stories, and a some personal insights too. He experienced his own wilderness years in the 1990s, unnoticed by me, because I kept seeing repeats popping up. I have a particular soft spot for a brilliant but obscure comedy-drama series called A Very Peculiar Practice, set in a university medical centre and written by Andrew Davies, who went on to write about a million adaptations including Pride and Prejudice. One thing I learned about Peter Davison which was I'd had no idea about is that this apparently super-Anglo, blond and blue-eyed actor has a black father, born in the West Indies.

In high school, my best friend and I made a pact that when our respective crushes (hers was Paul Darrow from Blake's 7) grew old and grey and weren't famous anymore, we would go over to the UK and track them down and take care of them in their dotage. Alas, Peter Davison seems to be still quite hale and active and well-loved, and in little need of my assistance. I might give it another twenty years!