The Booker prize-winning author explores her life through her memories, beloved objects and musings about age
This excellent book is unquestionably an autobiography, but that’s only the half of it. It covers the facts, from growing up in Egypt, then returning via Palestine “from the Middle Eastern world of warmth and colour to the chill grey of wartime England – with its own hectoring vocabulary of coupons and points and the V2 rocket”; of Chilprufe vests and Liberty bodices and bombed houses with gaping facades, and indistinct and baffling Londoners.
The narrative takes her through her marriage to an academic and their children, and a shrewd description of a trip to Russia. She records her reactions to the Suez crisis. To other people, this was just a foreign problem, to Penelope Lively something closer.
More interesting than just her life story is her take on events: on the distance between her young self who had to be told what a queer was and a niece who asked: “They once put people in prison for being gay?” Social changes enabled her to meet and marry a northern man from a working-class background. Her worldview isn’t always one you’d expect, but places her firmly in her times, not just her own experience
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The narrative takes her through her marriage to an academic and their children, and a shrewd description of a trip to Russia. She records her reactions to the Suez crisis. To other people, this was just a foreign problem, to Penelope Lively something closer.
More interesting than just her life story is her take on events: on the distance between her young self who had to be told what a queer was and a niece who asked: “They once put people in prison for being gay?” Social changes enabled her to meet and marry a northern man from a working-class background. Her worldview isn’t always one you’d expect, but places her firmly in her times, not just her own experience
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