As a fan of Tomalin's biographies I had such high expectations for this autobiography - they were exceeded. She turns the same level of detail on herself as she does when researching and writing about literary figures. This is a joy to read, full of frank insights into the highs and very real lows of her life. In both terms of the personal and her career. Superb. This is vying with 3 others as my favourite autobiography of the year.

Tomalin is known as a biographer of literary figures including Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Thomas Hardy and Charles Dickens. [I’ve read these last two, and have three of her previous books on the shelf.] I therefore expected that her own life story would have more to say about the biographer’s craft. Instead, this is a fairly straightforward – if sometimes restrained – autobiography ideal for readers of Diana Athill, David Lodge and John Carey (thinking specifically of the life stories all three have written in their eighties).

It’s especially revealing about the social and cultural history of the earlier decades her life covers: her French father’s socialist atheism, her mother’s leaning towards Christian Science, the upheaval of the war years, the bitterness and practical difficulties of her parents’ divorce, and the seeping of sexual freedom during her university days. I found the chapters on Tomalin’s schooling rather boring, but things pick up as she gets her Cambridge degree and marries Nicholas, who was the Labour president of the Student’s Union and edited Granta, which was then just a student magazine.

They lived in Greenwich and Tomalin had her hands full with part-time work for publishers and newspapers as well as raising their four children (one disabled with spina bifida). There were some jaw-dropping tragedies to come, but Tomalin is strangely matter-of-fact and unemotional about them all. Childbirth, losing a baby, breaking off an affair – she’s almost robotic in her recounting. I think this is reflective of her age and upbringing: it’s a very English attitude to simply state what happened but not draw attention to yourself for it. We might hear how she thought or reacted at the time, but I’m not sure we ever get a real sense of how she felt, especially about her multiple bereavements. In her introduction she refers to this as “moving between the trivial and the tragic in a way that could seem callous” in her attempt “to be as truthful as possible.”

So this is not a tell-all in any way; most will already know about Nicholas Tomalin’s death in 1973 in Israel while reporting for the Sunday Times, and I daresay her affair with Martin Amis, her deputy when she was the literary editor of the New Statesman, was common knowledge at the time. She was a widow; he was unattached. The only reasons it might seem scandalous were that he was significantly younger and she was his boss. Tomalin also never divulges whether she and Michael Frayn were lovers as well as close family friends before his divorce came through.

I most enjoyed hearing about Tomalin’s career – working with John Fowles and J.G. Ballard manuscripts as a publisher’s assistant (she had orders to reduce Fowles’s The Magus by a quarter but the cut material was later restored); judging the Booker Prize and being on the Royal Literary Fund committee as an editor; finally finding her true vocation with the Wollstonecraft book – and the ways her life intersected with other famous names from the literary world: for instance, Christopher Reid was her son’s nanny, Julian Barnes was her deputy at the Sunday Times, and V.S. Pritchett, Beryl Bainbridge and Alan Bennett were all neighbors at one time or another.

It’s a dignified but slightly aloof book: less forthcoming than Athill, less warm than Carey, less informative on the work than Lodge. The glimpses of her working life were the best bits for me, and I was somewhat frustrated at her reticence elsewhere. Still, I can recommend this to anyone interested in spending some time in London’s world of letters in the second half of the twentieth century.

Some favorite lines:

“My story should be cheering to anyone who is finding it hard to establish a career they find congenial.”

“Reviewing is an education in itself. You learn from the books, and you have to order and condense your thoughts and capture the reader’s attention.”

“I once described working at home as ‘silence, hard slog, loneliness, old clothes’, which was only partly true. I did miss the feeling of perpetually renewed excitement, of belonging to a band of brothers and sisters who care about the same things – books, reviews, journals, who’s said what, who’s writing where. But research is not all done silently at home, and is not always lonely.”

“Working on a biography means you are obsessed with one person and one period for several years. Another life is bound up with yours and will remain so for the rest of your own life – that at least is my experience. You have gone in too deep to cast them aside.”

“as I progressed with my research I sometimes felt I was carrying so much information in my head that it was like a physical weight”

Compelling reading indeed. I thoroughly enjoyed Tomalin’s honest and open-hearted autobiography, which not only documents her own and her family’s lives but is also a fascinating account the people she worked with, the publishing industry and the many familiar names that she knew and in many cases still knows. At one and the same time it’s the portrait of an interesting and talented woman, who has had more than her fair shares of sadness, plus the English literary scene over the latter half of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, a portrait that I found illuminating and endlessly fascinating.

This is a wonderful piece of autobiographical writing, providing significant insight into the life of the author. She has overcome a number of prejudices in her life and faced personal challenges which would have stopped many people in their tracks. With the support of her family and friends, it is fascinating to hear how she developed as a writer and turned to biography in her later years. Having read and enjoyed some of her writing, it was a joy to read this calm and detached account of a life that was far from calm or easy.

It has prompted me to seek out more of her work and comes highly recommended.