The heart sinks when autobiographers appear to possess the fatal gift of perfect recall, so it’s a happy relief that Nora Ephron admits a welcome capacity to forget. I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections (Doubleday, £12.99 £11.69) is a sophisticatedly smart, freshly wide-eyed series of short takes (and double-takes) on funny-to-frightening memory loss (some of it self-servingly selective, in the case of Lillian Hellman), the health geekery of egg-white omelettes, the mixed benefits of new technology (especially e-mail) and her other 21st-century preoccupations and misconceptions. In a list of 23 things people have a shocking capacity to be surprised by over and over again, she includes the statement: “Almost all books that are published as memoirs were initially written as novels, and then the agent/editor said, ‘This might work better as a memoir’.”
Certainly there’s a trick to celebrity memoirs that, like the big personalities they promote, promise much but leave you feeling wanting more. Stories I Only Tell My Friends: The Autobiography by Rob Lowe (Bantam, £18.99 £17.09) teases his fan base with a slick, seemingly confidential portrayal of a complex, charismatic actor who struts his own stage with humour, heart and a sleight-of-hand honesty that gives the illusion of the man but never steps out of character.
At every point Lowe’s story calls for a great novelist to re-create the distressed kid coping with family dysfunction, the young star-struck Brat Pack actor, the disappointments and excesses of a midlife career that happily ends in success and sobriety. He smartly and entertainingly preserves his private life under the disingenuous guise of personal confession and ditzy, glitzy but ultimately discreet Hollywood gossip.
On that level, Lowe gives an accomplished performance; as does Stephen Fry in The Fry Chronicles (Penguin, £8.99 £8.54), disarmingly downplaying his early development as an actor, writer and public figure in the cultural and social ethos of Cambridge and London showbiz circles and intelligently creating his per- sona as a self-deprecating tragic-comic character. He draws a distinction between self-revelation and self-explanation; the former more likely than the latter for a true artist, he says. Nevertheless, he analyses himself and his complex psyche with some fond relish, and his anecdotes of adventures with others are affectionately witty.
Like Fry, Christopher Hitchens is formidably well read, well informed and equipped with an intellectual and theatrical talent to amuse and argue an issue with grace, humour and eloquence. Hitch-22: A Memoir (Atlantic, £9.99 £9.49), when it was first published, was the candid record of a public controversialist’s boisterously contradictory life and richly combative career; but this new paperback edition now comes with a phlegmatic prologue in which he considers his imminent death from oesophageal cancer. Hitchens’ voice might soon be stilled, but his consistent opposition to superstition and passionate commitment to science, reason and the rights of common humanity will survive in these lively autobiographical pages.
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What another outspoken American — the black activist pastor Jeremiah Wright — thought and how he talked and how, politically, he had to be relegated to a less upfront role in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, is only one of the back-stories that give breadth, depth and authority to The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick (Picador, £9.99 £9.49). Remnick brings subtlety to Obama’s rise to power, nuance to an iconic man for our times and well-judged balance to a complex story of major cultural and modern political significance.
At more or less the same time, the short, sharp political rise and fall of Gordon Brown was being played out to the beat of a rather more muffled drum in 10 Downing Street. Behind the Black Door by Sarah Brown (Ebury, £18.99 £15.99) is a loyal, loving, positive account of what can be achieved by a Prime Minister’s supportive wife, putting up a brave front while her husband is battling for his political survival. Her memoir is a diary-based chronology of wifely duties: official travel and hospitality, charitable works, close celebrity encounters and an empathetic concern for the wider concerns of motherhood beyond her difficult experiences.
If any memoir this year (or any year) deserves to be positively credited as being as strange and as rich as fiction, it is The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance by Edmund de Waal - click here to read an interview with the author - (Vintage, £8.99 £8.54) which is almost Proustian in its richly sensual evocation of a lost, floating fin-de-siècle world through precious objects and the proprieties of opulent upper-middle-class life. The hare is one of 264 wood and ivory netsuke, collected in Paris by the merchant Charles Ephrussi, given to a banker cousin in Vienna and presented to us now as the key to unlock the dramatic, dynastic saga of a pan-European family in peace and at war.
An example of a prize-winning novelist turning to narrative non-fiction, crossing over with all the skills of his literary craft intact and honed to a fine edge of outrage, is Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (Penguin, £8.99 £8.54), who reports from devastated New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, telling of an innocent, well-intentioned man, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, twice a victim, first of natural forces, then of man’s inhumanity to man and official oppression. As a polemic of apocalyptic destruction aggravated by bureaucratic paranoia, with a human tragedy at the heart of a multi-layered nightmare, it is already a classic of its kind.
Finally, appropriately, Graven With Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman (Short Books, £20 £18) breathes literary life into an ornament of the Tudor court of Henry VIII, a man as much a poet as a politician, a finely tuned diplomat and obligingly bloody killer, a favourite of the king and fatal lover of Anne Boleyn.
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Sir Thomas Wyatt’s multi-layered life is told in terms of his passion for poetry which, in its dual role as a public art and a secret cipher, ensured his survival when the axe began to fall. It is a clever biography, captivating as a netsuke and as charming as an historical novel.
Retro read: Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Published in 2000, a few days before Sage died of emphysema, Bad Blood was hailed as a classic modern autobiography. It is a family psychodrama and a perceptive study of herself as a survivor of three marriages and three periods of social history from the mid-1940s to the late 1950s: first as a child in a Welsh parish with her vicar grandfather and grandmother; later with her parents in a postwar rural council estate; finally, pregnant and married at 16, making a good new life that transcends the bad blood. Fourth Estate, £8.99 £8.54