In a lively memoir, the author of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil shares the story of her own life growing up among women in the 1950s, describing her childhood in New Zealand, her discovery of men during the swinging 1960s, her writing career, and her diverse roles as unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelikst, feminist, antifeminist, and more.
Auto Da Fay is the scriptwriter, novelist, journalist and pioneering feminist Fay Weldon's candid and enjoyably digressive autobiography. Concluding at the beginning of the 1960s with the birth of her second son and the production of her very first television play, it's primarily an account of her (often arduous) formative years. (Those in search of revelations about her time at the heart of the women's movement will, for the moment at least, have to rely on
Big Women, her fictional account of that period.)
Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor, if biologically necessary, role in her existence. She was raised, along with her older sister Jane, by her formidable mother and her bohemian grandmother, a woman once on intimate terms with HG Wells, Rebecca West and Edith Nesbitt. (Weldon's family, it turns out, has an impressive literary pedigree; her grandfather, Edgar, uncle Selwyn and, for a brief while, her mother were all novelists.) Arriving in London just after the Second World War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant; the experience of living below stairs later helped Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs. After St Andrews University, Weldon worked in the Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying conventions of the times, she remained a single parent. Following a stint as a consumer agony aunt for the Daily Mirror she drifted into advertising before in utter desperation entering into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience. With cool, unwavering honesty she details, in the third person, the truly depressing experience of being hitched to a celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy West End night-club. She escaped, found true love and, working alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David Wevill and Peter Porter, went on to pen such winning advertising slogans as "Go to Work on An Egg" and "Unzip a Banana" and began writing seriously. Riddled with Weldon's customary wayward and even mildly contradictory opinions, this frank, acerbic and witty memoir can be infuriating on occasions but is certainly never dull.--Travis Elborough
