Memoir

Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, the Russian press has been slowly, methodically strangled, which has forced existential choices on newspaper and TV journalists. Twenty-one have been killed – beaten, poisoned or gunned down. Others, such as Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, highly regarded investigative reporters, have been forced into exile. Yet others, like the ‘dear friends’ of this book’s title, have chosen a different path – to cleave ever closer to the regime. The authors tell the fascinating story of those choices and allow us a glimpse of why they were taken.

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.

Be under no illusions: this is not a food memoir. Chopping Onions on My Heart is a linguistic exploration of belonging; a history of the Jewish community in Iraq; and an urgent endeavour to save an endangered language. Above all, it is a reckoning with generational trauma. The subjects of Samantha Ellis’s previous books include the life of Anne Brontë, heroines of classic literature, feminism and romantic comedy. She is the daughter of Iraqi Jewish refugees, and the language she grew up around, the language of her people and culture, is dying. Judeo-Iraqi Arabic ‘came out of the collisions of Hebrew-speaking Jews and Aramaic-speaking Babylonians, and then absorbed linguistic influences from all the other people who conquered Iraq’.

Geoff Dyer, eh? Geoff Bloody Dyer – without doubt one of contemporary Eng. Lit.’s most successful, intellectually playful and stylistically distinctive voices. His extraordinary oeuvre spans fiction, non-fiction, memoir, criticism and genre-defying hybrids, often likened – I don’t know by who, but by me at least now – to greats such as W.G. Sebald or Roland Barthes. Dyer expertly navigates the tricky territory between high culture and everyday experience, balancing erudition with comic digression in books ranging from Out of Sheer Rage (a hilarious study of not writing a book about D.H.

‘The publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar,’ Arthur Koestler once declared. For some reason this put-down has never stopped publishers from fathering their memoirs, and the book trade titan’s life and times used to be as much a staple of the library shelf as slim volumes of nature poetry. As in other branches of life-writing, the procedural approach tends to vary. There are practical primers – Stanley Unwin’s The Truth about Publishing, say, from the year of the general strike, or Anthony Blond’s The Publishing Game (1971); there are delightful vagaries in the style pioneered by Grant Richards’s Author Hunting (1934); and there is the emollient, if not absolutely vainglorious, reminiscence, most recently on display in Tom Maschler’s Publisher (2005).

When one thinks of ‘odd’, one might imagine the bizarre but not the boring. Yet odd thingscan indeed be boring – as Peter Carpenter’s book shows. First, a word about my admiration for David Bowie, which began when I was 12. He was a vastly gifted artist as well as being a supremely ambitious man, who once floated himself on the stock exchange and appeared in an ad for bottled water when already a millionaire many times over. He also had sex with children, helping himself to the virginity of a 13-year-old girl as part of the ‘Baby Groupies’ circle. I think of myself at 13. Would I have had sex with Bowie, given the chance? You bet! Do I think it was creepy he seduced 13-year-olds? Without a doubt. No such paradoxes are explored in the pedestrian plod that is Bowieland.

Girl, 1983, a fusion of novel and memoir, tantalises with what we already know of its author. Linn Ullmann is the daughter of the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann and the much older Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman. Their relationship was probed in her previous work, Unquiet. Here the parents are more distant figures, as the adult Linn attempts to reconstruct her headstrong 16-year-old self and recover a disturbing interlude spent in Paris as a would-be model. In 2019, Ullmann is struggling to write when her younger self materialises like an imaginary friend with a message that demands to be heard. Ullmann has a daughter now, which makes the quest to understand the events of decades ago all the more urgent.

You can learn a lot about a winemaker by tasting his wine. In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne wrote of one wine that smelt of ‘simmering insanity’, reflecting the angry Italian who made it. I didn’t have quite such an extreme reaction to Peter Hahn’s Clos de la Meslerie Vouvray, but I did deduce that he was idealistic, determined, romantic, perhaps a little dogmatic, and given to certain esoteric beliefs. Having now read his book Angels in the Cellar, I can say that my deductions were mostly right. Hahn is an American whose career as an investment banker came to an end when he suffered a breakdown in the back of a London taxi. He decided to give up the rat race and bought a neglected Vouvray domaine, where he moved with his family to live la belle vie.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock. The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming.

Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s account of her time at Facebook, has landed top of the New York Times’s bestseller charts and fourth in the UK’s Sunday Times equivalent. It owes its success in large part to a ferocious campaign that Meta – Facebook’s parent company – waged against it on publication. When Meta faces a barrage of public criticism, which it often does, it typically stays quiet and gets on with things. And that approach works – its share price has continued to soar despite scandal after scandal. So when the company not only published a series of furious denials but also had staffers post about the book on their personal social media feeds, and even launched a legal action to prevent Wynn-Williams promoting it, people started to take notice.