New & Recent Autobiographies To Read This Summer
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This Much Is True by Miriam Margolyes
Bafta-winning actor and creator of unforgettable characters such as Lady Whiteadder and Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes is one the UK’s national treasures. Now, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story. Find out how being conceived in an air-raid gave her curly hair; what pranks led to her being known as the naughtiest girl Oxford High School ever had, how she ended up posing nude for painter Augustus John as a teenager, why Bob Monkhouse was the best (male) kiss she's ever had, how she declared her love to Vanessa Redgrave and being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with brilliant, hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is warm, honest and full of surprises.
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Old Rage by Sheila Hancock
Sheila Hancock looked like she was managing old age. She had weathered and even thrived in widowhood, taking on acting roles that would have been demanding for a woman half her age. She had energy, friends, a devoted family, a lovely home. She could still remember her lines. So why, at 89, having sailed past supposedly disturbing milestones – 50, 70, even 80 – without a qualm, did she suddenly feel so furious? Shocking diagnoses, Brexit and bereavement seemed to knock her from every quarter. And that was before lockdown. Home alone, classified as 'extremely vulnerable', she found herself yelling at the TV and talking to pigeons. But she can at least take a good long look at life – her work and family, her beliefs (many of them the legacy of her wartime childhood) and, uncomfortable as it might be to face, her future. This is the result of that introspection.
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Without Warning & Only Sometimes by Kit de Waal
Author Kit de Waal grew up in a household of opposites and extremes. Her haphazard mother rarely cooked, forbade Christmas and birthdays, worked as a cleaner, nurse and childminder – sometimes all at once – and believed the world would end in 1975. Meanwhile, her father stuffed barrels full of treats for his relatives in the Caribbean, cooked elaborate meals on a whim and splurged money they didn't have on cars, suits and shoes fit for a prince. Both of her parents were waiting for paradise. It never came. Caught between three worlds – Irish, Caribbean and British – in the 1960s, Without Warning & Only Sometimes is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day.
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Busy Being Free by Emma Forrest
Born in London, Emma Forrest began her writing career as a teenage columnist on the Sunday Times, going on to have columns in the Guardian, the Independent and Elle. By 30, she had published three novels and exited journalism to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Now the author of Your Voice in My Head and Royals has written a beautiful, unputdownable memoir about love and heartbreak, sex and celibacy, growing up and starting again. This is a story of swapping a Hollywood marriage and LA mansion with waterside views for an attic flat shared with just her daughter in north London. Here, she finds herself elated to be alone with herself, someone she genuinely thought she might never get to see again. This is what follows when, after a life guided by romantic obsession, she decides to turn her back not only on marriage, but all romantic and sexual attachments.
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The Crane Wife by Christina Joyce Hauser
Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realised she had almost signed up to live somebody else's life. In this intimate, frank and funny memoir in essays, CJ lets go of 'how life was supposed to be' and goes looking for more honest ways of living. She kisses internet strangers, officiates a wedding, visits a fertility clinic. She reads Rebecca in the house her new boyfriend shared with his ex-wife and rewinds Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story to ask if you can ever have a fresh start with an old love. She writes about friends and lovers, grief and heartbreak, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all.
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The Red of My Blood by Clover Stroud
Clover Stroud is a writer and journalist, writing regularly for the Sunday Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph. A few weeks before Christmas 2020, Clover's sister died of breast cancer, aged 46. Just days before, she had been given years to live. Her sudden death split Clover's life apart. The Red of My Blood charts Clover's fearless passage through the first year after her sister's death. It is a book about what life feels like when death interrupts it, and about bearing the unbearable and describing an experience that seems beyond words. Lyrical and hopeful, it is also about the magical way in which death and life exist so vividly beside one another, and the wonder of being human.
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How To Live When You Could Be Dead by Dame Deborah James
At the age of 35, Deborah James was blindsided by incurable bowel cancer – and was given a less than 8% chance of surviving five years. More than five years later – and just months after her untimely death – her book How to Live When You Could Be Dead shows readers how to build a positive mindset and, through this, think about what they could do if they believed they could do anything they want. To honour her memory, Ebury will donate £3 from the sale of each copy sold in the UK to the Bowelbabe Fund for Cancer Research UK.
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And Three Top Reads To Pre-Order Now…
A Pocketful of Happiness by Richard E Grant
Richard E. Grant emigrated from Swaziland to London in 1982, with dreams of making it as an actor, when he unexpectedly met and fell in love with renowned dialect coach Joan Washington. Their relationship and marriage, navigating the highs and lows of Hollywood, parenthood and loss, lasted almost 40 years. When Joan died last year, her final challenge to him was to find ‘a pocketful of happiness in every day’. This honest and frequently hilarious memoir is written in honour of that challenge. Richard has faithfully kept a diary since childhood and, in these entries, he shares in raw detail everything he has experienced: both the pain of losing his wife and the excitement of their life together, from the role that transformed his life overnight in Withnail & I to his thrilling Oscar nomination 30 years later for Can You Ever Forgive Me? Told with candour in Richard’s very own style, A Pocketful of Happiness is a powerful, funny and moving celebration of life’s unexpected joys.
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Calling The Shots by Sue Barker
In 1971, Sue Barker's coach sent his 15-year-old tennis protégé to a junior championship in France, alone, with a one-way ticket, telling her she'd have to win the money to pay for her return fare. Sue hid in the grounds of the hosting tennis club overnight to avoid paying for a hotel. The next day, she walked onto the court and smashed it – five years later, she was Britain's No 1. The same combination of grit, grace and talent took her to the top of live sports TV. Now, after four decades on camera encouraging other legends to share their stories, she is telling her own. Going all in for her once-only autobiography, Sue takes us inside the showbiz world of 70s and early 80s tennis. She reveals the battles she fought for hard-won success in two careers, gives us a ringside seat on the nation's biggest sporting dramas and a fascinating insider's understanding of competitors under pressure.
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Just Sayin’ by Malorie Blackman
Malorie Blackman is one of Britain's best and most beloved children's authors. Before her Bafta award wins, OBE and appointment as Children's Laureate in 2013, Malorie was a young girl from south London who fell in love with books and found a home in her local library. From embracing her alternative way of seeing the world and all its fascinating differences and possibilities to her desire to share that passion with others by becoming an English teacher, but being told no by her careers advisor because of her race, the doctor who told her she would be dead by 30 when she was diagnosed with sickle cell and the 80 rejection letters she received from publishers before her first ever children's book was published, this memoir takes readers through a lens of extraordinary experiences as Malorie offers insight into the nature of growing up in post-war Britain, why we must protect the arts, the fraught navigation of our healthcare system, and surviving structural and societal racism.
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