https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/a-life-of-my-own-by-claire-tomalin/

I have previously hugely enjoyed Tomalin’s biographies of Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and the young H.G. Wells, so I had pretty high hopes for this autobiography, published in 2017 when she was already 84 (she turned 90 in June). And it pretty much fulfilled them.

Tomalin is the daughter of an English musician and a French writer, who married too young and were already on the verge of separation when she was conceived. She too married young, finding a journalist chap while a student at Cambridge, and the relationship deteriorated into on-again-off-again until he was killed covering the Yom Kippur war, exactly fifty years ago last month. But they had five children, two of who died, one as a baby, the other in her early 20s; and their surviving son has a serious disability. She tells us much less about her second husband, Michael Frayn, which is a little disappointing. But there is still plenty of personal material to draw on, with her literary endeavours a secondary theme. The hilarious contact lens scene from Noises Off was inspired by something that actually happened to Tomalin while on holiday with Frayn.

Writing of her time at Cambridge, she says that she gave up writing poetry because she felt she was not good enough at it; but this “left an emptiness in my life which has never quite been filled.” I find that rather sad. Her biographies are superlative, but I guess she feels that there was something more creative that was possible and that she missed out on. There is still time. ( )

Excellent - read it in a sitting

Although there were a few slow spots in this memoir, I found this woman's life inspiring. She overcame a number of personal setbacks and difficulties to have an engaging and full intellectual life. ( )

Literary biographer Claire Tomalin considers her own story in her memoir A Life of My Own. As she explains in the introduction, she pieced the narrative together in part by going through her old datebooks, and unfortunately, this choice of sources shows. Tomalin lists a lot of friends, lovers, relatives, and colleagues, as well as many lunches, parties, and other get-togethers with them, but none of these connections are characterized with any depth. Moreover, the narrative feels distant even when Tomalin is describing scenes of heavy emotional import, such as the deaths of her husband and two of her children. My high hopes for this book after listening to a memorable interview with the author on NPR in 2018 were not fulfilled. ( )