Memoir

In October 2018, Andrew Hussey, the convivial and courageous observer and analyst of the political and social travails of modern France, was cycling back to his office after lunch through the rather staid and un-bohemian environs of the Boulevard Raspail on the Left Bank in Paris. To the ‘middle-aged man who already has a heart condition’, the scene into which he pedalled near the Montparnasse cemetery was terrifying, but to the veteran historian of the fractious Fifth Republic not particularly unusual. Parisians were sitting on café terraces and queuing for ice cream while just around the corner ‘a mini-civil war’ was taking place.

Food memoirs, as distinct from cookery books, and from the relatively new genre of ‘biographies’ of ingredients, used to fall into three rough groups: foraging, hunting or gathering food; producing or cooking food; and eating. Like the restaurateur Keith McNally’s recent I Regret Almost Everything, Michael Finnerty’s The Cheese Cure adds a fourth category, memoirs of those who sell or serve food. These foodie books often blur at the margins and merge at the borders but usually share the characteristic of being narrated in the first person – and if recipes are given they are often incidental. (Of course, many of these authors also write cookery books.) There is a canon of such tomes by writers including Elizabeth David, M.F.K.

Nicola Sturgeon has all the usual things she wants to achieve in her memoir: rumours to scotch, a legacy to spell out, and so on. But the most important thing to the former first minister seems to be telling her readers that she is in fact not Nicola Sturgeon. The ‘seemingly confident, combative woman who dominated Scottish politics for more than a decade, unnerved the Westminster establishment, helped lead Scotland to the brink of independence and steered it through a global pandemic’ (her words) is in fact an outfit that the real author of Frankly has been wearing for a very long time. She seems quite keen to cast it off. In 1992, she says, ‘Nicola the soundbite, facsimile politician was born’.

We all know that life is full of people who try to con us, often starting with a voice on the phone. ‘I’m speaking from the fraud department of your bank.’ ‘I’m your local BT engineer.’  No, you’re not from either my bank or BT. In all likelihood you are speaking from a scam farm somewhere in south-east Asia.  This book, however, deals with the serious con artists, the ones who infiltrate your life over a period of time, using psychological skills, imagination and often charm until they have finessed you into a position where you willingly hand them a large sum of money, often your life savings. Then whoosh! – and neither the scammer nor the money is ever seen again.

There were years when, like many others, I dreamed of crossing America coast to coast, riding the Greyhound bus. It was the thing to do – a rite of passage. For those who never made it, all is not lost: Joanna Pocock has done it for us. Twice.  In 2006, fending off depression after her third miscarriage and the death of her sister, Pocock took the Greyhound from Detroit to Los Angeles, ‘running away from loss’. Seventeen years later she has gone back, looking for the motels, diners, cities, suburbs and truck stops encountered on that first trip, and she is stunned by what she finds – stations closed or pared back, with nowhere to wash, rest or buy food.

‘Paris, like many old cities, is saturated with blood.’ The food writer Chris Newens certainly knows how to draw the reader in. A Londoner who has lived in Paris for the past ten years, he sets out to eat his way through all the arrondissements, starting with the 20th and spiralling backwards through the coil of the capital. Each chapter evokes the history and atmosphere of a different neighbourhood and focuses on one dish, which the author then attempts to cook in his authentically cramped Parisian kitchen. Newens, who read anthropology at the LSE, comes from a family that ran a bakery and tearoom for six generations and had their own recipe for the custard tart known as Maid of Honour.

Soon after Hitler came to power in 1933, Charlotte Beradt, who as a Jewish journalist and a communist had been barred from publishing, found her sleep wracked by nightmares that unmistakably reenacted the terrors of the Nazi regime. Deprived of her regular employment, her own dream experiences prompted the subversive if dangerous idea of recording the dreams of her fellow citizens. ‘I began to collect the dreams that the Nazi dictatorship had, as it were, dictated,’ she wrote. Citing a dictum of a Nazi official that in Hitler’s Germany no one has a private life except while asleep, the material she collected demonstrated how dreams ‘as minutely as a seismograph’ can record impinging external realities.

It’s hard to classify this thought-provoking book – part memoir, part philosophical exploration, but mostly a deeply researched family history. And what a history that is. Tim Franks, born in 1968, has been a BBC reporter for almost two decades, and now presents Newshour on the World Service. So he knows how to tell stories about other people. But the events here concern himself, and many of them are heartbreaking, as he searches for an answer to the question of what comprises identity and to what extent we are products of our ancestors.

Mothers of America             let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body                               but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery             images... So wrote Frank O’Hara in ‘Ave Maria’, in 1964.

Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP), and perhaps have something to learn here, though I’m struggling to understand, eek, ‘lesson seven’: Realise... that when you step over the salt circle into the five-pointed star coven of politics, you have ceased to become a person. You are now a c**t. There’s a feeling that the author still has a touch of PTSD. Readers with expectations of schadenfreude will not be disappointed.   Sarah Vine shoots thunderbolts.

Alice Mah didn’t enjoy finding her roots. Even though ‘ancestor tourism’ is increasingly popular among westernised descendants of Chinese émigrés like her, she felt a nameless sort of dread when visiting the village in the Cantonese county of Taishan where her great-grandfather came from. It didn’t help that she’d just attended the morbid Qingming festival, when the Chinese remember their dead by sweeping their tombs. Mah’s memoir opens here, and we nervously anticipate the tragedy or horror that will surely strike – and are left waiting. Other than the pushiness of Taishanese cousins, who demand ‘red pockets’ (a traditional way of gifting money in small red envelopes) and donations for the village from their richer compatriots, the trip seems uneventful.