Precious Lives (Signed) - Hardcover

Forster, Margaret

4.12

199 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 070116770X ISBN 13: 9780701167707

Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 1998

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A follow-up to Margaret Forster's "Hidden Lives" (a family memoir of three generations of women), this account takes up the story of her gritty northern father. He was not a man to answer questions - least of all about life and death - so the author attempts to answers them for herself as she looks back at her father's life and indomitable character from the perspective of his ninth decade, evoking incidents from her Cumbrian childhood, his working life and stubborn old age, trying to make sense of their largely unspoken relationship and of his tenacious hold on life and his family.

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Review:

In this sequel to her recent bestselling memoir, Hidden Lives, in which she told the story of the women in her family, the novelist and biographer Margaret Foster describes her father Arthur's life and death, structuring the narrative around the last six years of his life until his lingering death at the age of 96. As he begins to fail, Forster's beloved sister-in-law Marion is diagnosed with terminal cancer, and Forster compares the fierce struggles both Arthur and Marion put up against the inevitable, marvelling at their tenacity in the face of extreme humiliation and suffering. As she puts it, "These have been two stories not of life but of dying", so this is anything but a sentimental account of death, about which Forster ponders bleakly and with a bracing philosophical clarity. She sifts through her memories of growing up in Carlisle and builds up an often comical portrait of an irascible, routine-obsessed working-class man, who works hard for his family, hates hospitals and is scornful of self-pity. Arthur is as vivid as any of her fictional characters and Forster's calm account of his last few months in a nursing home, unable to hold on to his fiercely-guarded independence, unable to enjoy the landscapes of his beloved Lake District, is both moving and--in terms of his courage--inspiring. --Emily Ormond

Review:

"I have great admiration for Margaret Forster's ability to fashion absorbing tales of family life from the most ordinary people in Precious Lives... Her insistence on validating the domestic, combined with her meticulous eye and painstaking research, creates a past which reveals modest lives with all their awkwardnesses and painful secrets." (Irish Times)

"Margaret Forster's books hold you in their grip and linger in the mind long after being put down...Precious Lives is unputdownable... A remarkably courageous book which we should read, inwardly digest and, above all, enjoy" (Mary Wesley Daily Express)

"Forster is a terrific writer, witty and compassionate... [Precious Lives] manages to be completely honest wihout compromising the delicacy of its subjects: it is moving and funny too" (Cressida Connolly Spectator)

""Dying is an art," wrote Sylvia Plath. Writing about dying is also an art, one which Margaret Forster possesses in no small measure... [She] pursues her purpose with such flair that she succeeds, once again, in riveting her reader... Precious Lives adds up to an exemplary tribute to two striking individuals" (Patricia Craig Independent)

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