Life Itself!: An Autobiography - Hardcover

Dundy, Elaine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860495133 ISBN 13: 9781860495137

Publisher: Virago, 2001

Synopsis

Author of the celebrated and hilarious THE DUD AVOCADO, the classic novel about a young American ingenue in Paris, Elaine Dundy was born in New York in the 1930s. Her first years were spent in an apartment on Park Avenue until the stock market crash wiped out most of the family's money. She went to university in the south where, among other studies, she worked hard at losing her virginity. Deciding the stage was her true home, Elaine Dundy headed first to Paris and then to London, where she met and married the famous theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. Though their union was intoxicating, it was far from easy and the successful publication in 1958 of her novel finished off the marriage. But it was the opening of a new world of writers for Elaine Dundy, including friendships with Tennessee Williams, Hemingway and Gore Vidal. Extremely funny and extraordinarily honest this wonderfully remembered story of growing up in America is as much a tonic as life itself.

About this title

Review

The exclamatory trill of the title alone, Life Itself!, suggests an exuberance to Elaine Dundy's mostly jaunty memoirs but also an insecurity. One of three Brimberg sisters from a wealthy New York Jewish background, her grand father, a Latvian immigrant, had invented a type of screw that made his fortune. Elaine's designs, however, were more on screwball fun. Drawn to the stage, she left America for Paris and wrote The Dud Avocado, published to popular acclaim in 1958, which described her salad days as a rich young socialite in the French capital. Fascinated with the sassy, vivacious actresses of pre-war Hollywood and their witty, charming, suave leading-men, along came Kenneth Tynan, enfant terrible of 1950s English critical journalism. He carried a fearsome, bullying swagger reminiscent of Dundy's violent and abusive father. While she wanted to be a character created by Tennessee Williams, she fell in love with men written by "Papa" Hemingway. So she married Tynan.

Life Itself! is most intriguing in its depiction of Dundy's relationship with Tynan, though the details of his sado-masochistic "Oxford practices" have been well documented elsewhere, in his second wife Kathleen Tynan's The Life of Kenneth Tynan. Life with Ken, a Barbie in her flurry of frocks and socialising, saw Dundy circulate with a gilded cast of associates, rarely dull and never unknown: Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Cyril Connolly, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Green and Gore Vidal make frequent appearances, as she commiserates with the wives of Peters Brook and Ustinov how hard it is for actresses with illustrious partners to find work. Once the heart stops bleeding, what redeems passages of flapper frippery are when the screwball wit kicks in, or she pauses to allow her writing the space it cries out for, and justifies when allowed. When she finally left Tynan, after a brutal attack and serial psychological sadism, she produced mediocre plays, reasonable journalism, fuelled by the pills and booze which nearly ended her life. Rescued by electro-therapy and a discovered love of Elvis (of whom she wrote a respected biography, Elvis and Gladys), one hopes she is allowed to live out her days in California with peaceful reflections and calmer syntax. --David Vincent

Review

Touching, fascinating, endlessly entertaining (Jilly Cooper, Books of the Year, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

An absoute treat, by turns jaunty, pleasingly self-knowing and unexpectedly moving (India Knight, SUNDAY TIMES)

Compelling from the first page to the last (Geoffrey Wansell, Books of the Year, DAILY MAIL)

For God's sake, read this book. Its author didn't just live life - she attacked it. (MODERN WOMAN)

About this edition

• Publisher: Virago
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1860495133
• ISBN 13: 9781860495137
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400