From Publishers Weekly
Readers who think Weldon's provocatively clever fiction (The Bulgari Connection; Wicked Women; etc.) is also highly improbable need only pick up this frank, irreverent memoir to discover her own life has been far more strange and dramatic than any novel could credibly convey. All the characteristics of Weldon's fiction-stinging wit, jaunty prose, memorable bon mots-are present in this kaleidoscopic peregrination through six decades of picaresque adventures. The racy narrative begins with older generations of Weldon's family and continues with Weldon, her mother and her sister. Her family history on both sides is eccentric and troubled. Fay was christened Franklin when she was born in 1931 in England, where her mother had fled temporarily, leaving her adulterous husband in New Zealand. Eventually she took Fay and her older sister back to Christchurch, but the reconciliation didn't work, and they returned to England for Fay's secondary and college education. She was always drawn to the wrong men, risky behavior, chronic impecuniousness and even promiscuity. In addition to being routinely victimized by men, the women in Weldon's family were susceptible to seeing ghosts and succumbing to emotional breakdowns. How Weldon made her way as a poor unwed mother (in the 1950s, she lived in a house without heat, water or an indoor bathroom) through several bizarre relationships into a job as an advertising copywriter, is a riveting story; the book closes as she's beginning a career as a TV scriptwriter. This memoir will be read by some for the real "dirt" on a popular novelist, but it will last longer as a reflection of a time when feminism had not yet released women from the careless perfidy of feckless men. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Weldon's thoroughly absorbing autobiography primarily focuses on her peripatetic childhood and difficult years of single parenthood, concluding in the 1960s with her second marriage and the beginning of her writing career. Born in 1931, she spent her childhood in New Zealand, raised by her resourceful mother after her parents divorced. Relocating to England after World War II, her mother worked as a servant, an experience that provided the basis for Weldon's television script for Upstairs, Downstairs. Despite their poverty-stricken circumstances, Weldon's family had been at the center of literary soirees attended by the likes of H. G. Wells, and her grandmother's dismissive accounts of some of London's leading authors are hilarious ("Ezra Pound would come round when he was drunk and play her piano with his nose. She took it personally"). When Weldon became pregnant and decided to remain single, she struggled to support her son by working in advertising. When that proved too difficult, she married for convenience, a disastrous experience that she describes in the third person. Filled with warmth, wit, and her trademark irreverence, Weldon's memoir is a vivid and engaging account of a brave and brainy "lost girl" who found her way. Joanne Wilkinson
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Kirkus Reviews
"An acerbic and affectionate memoir from the prolific novelist, satirist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and chronicler par excellence."
The Times (London)
"Its evocation of the 1950s is vivid, as is its record of a kind of female solidarity."
The Daily Mail
"You can’t put this terrific book down. . . . This time she excels herself."
The Sydney Morning Herald
"A hair-curling memoir."
Evening Standard
"Endearing and . . . admirable."
Book Description
From life as a poor unwed mother in London to becoming one of England’s bestselling authors and most popular exports, Fay Weldon has crammed more than most into her years. Wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, winer and diner—Fay leads us through her peripatetic life with barely a role she can’t illuminate. Born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, Fay spent most of her youth in New Zealand. With her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, generally absent, Fay’s intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. Brought up among women, Fay found men a mystery until the swinging sixties in London where she gradually became a central figure among the writers, artists, and thinkers. She has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. At first, she managed to scrape along, penning winning advertising slogans, before she began to write fiction. As this memoir comes to a close, we witness the stirring of her first novel. Riddled with Weldon’s customarily fierce opinions, this frank and absorbing memoir is vintage Fay. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. With this engaging autobiography, she has finally decided to turn her authorial wit and keen eye on . . . herself.
About the Author
Fay Weldon was born in England, raised in New Zealand, and received her M.A. in economics and psychology from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She is the author of Auto Da Fay, The Bulgari Connection, Rhode Island Blues, Big Girls Don't Cry, Worst Fears, Splitting, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, among many other novels, plays, and two books of nonfiction.
Auto da Fay: A Memoir FROM THE PUBLISHER
"From life as a poor unwed mother in London to becoming one of England's bestselling authors and most popular exports, Fay Weldon has crammed more than most into her years. Wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, winer and diner - Fay leads us through her peripatetic life with barely a role she can't illuminate." "Born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, Fay spent most of her youth in New Zealand. With her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, generally absent, Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. Brought up among women, Fay found men a mystery until the swinging sixties in London where she gradually became a central figure among the writers, artists, and thinkers. She has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. At first, she managed to scrape along, penning winning advertising slogans, before she began to write fiction. As this memoir comes to a close, we witness the stirring of her first novel." Riddled with Weldon's customarily fierce opinions, this frank and absorbing memoir is vintage Fay. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. With this engaging autobiography, she has finally decided to turn her authorial wit and keen eye on...herself.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
Though she announces at the beginning of Auto da Fay that she's looking for the patterns of her own experience (and finds them), she's a woman so ''rooted in the carnal and instinctive world'' that she can hardly bend her life-so-far to a single narrative arc. Her portrait of London in the 1950's and 60's is intricately evocative. Her treatment of her adulterous father, who might have been given short shrift as a character, is generous: he's roundly forgiven and clearly beloved. Herself-as-heroine is multifaceted, nuanced and self-judging. Although, like many memoirists, Weldon ends her book just at the point when her career is about to take hold, her story of a lost girl on her way to finding herself winds up having heft as well as lift. — Janet Burroway
The Washington Post
Beginning with its deliciously witty title and ending with its staunch final paragraph, Fay Weldon's autobiography is from first to last a wonder. Incredible though it may seem, the forever-youthful British novelist is now in her early seventies, from which vantage point she looks back upon her early years with fondness and regret, with the occasional brief glint of malice or flicker of astonishment, with protests against fate's cruel surprises yet a stoic acceptance of their inevitability. — Jonathan Yardley
Publishers Weekly
Readers who think Weldon's provocatively clever fiction (The Bulgari Connection; Wicked Women; etc.) is also highly improbable need only pick up this frank, irreverent memoir to discover her own life has been far more strange and dramatic than any novel could credibly convey. All the characteristics of Weldon's fiction-stinging wit, jaunty prose, memorable bon mots-are present in this kaleidoscopic peregrination through six decades of picaresque adventures. The racy narrative begins with older generations of Weldon's family and continues with Weldon, her mother and her sister. Her family history on both sides is eccentric and troubled. Fay was christened Franklin when she was born in 1931 in England, where her mother had fled temporarily, leaving her adulterous husband in New Zealand. Eventually she took Fay and her older sister back to Christchurch, but the reconciliation didn't work, and they returned to England for Fay's secondary and college education. She was always drawn to the wrong men, risky behavior, chronic impecuniousness and even promiscuity. In addition to being routinely victimized by men, the women in Weldon's family were susceptible to seeing ghosts and succumbing to emotional breakdowns. How Weldon made her way as a poor unwed mother (in the 1950s, she lived in a house without heat, water or an indoor bathroom) through several bizarre relationships into a job as an advertising copywriter, is a riveting story; the book closes as she's beginning a career as a TV scriptwriter. This memoir will be read by some for the real "dirt" on a popular novelist, but it will last longer as a reflection of a time when feminism had not yet released women from the careless perfidy of feckless men. Photos. Agent, Emma Parry. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Weldon relates how a tough little girl from New Zealand sailed into the Swinging Sixties and emerged a famed author. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An acerbic and affectionate memoir from the prolific novelist, satirist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and chronicler par excellence of the war between the sexes. Weldon (Rhode Island Blues, 2000, etc.) was born in 1931 and speedily given the name Franklin Birkinshaw, which caused some initial confusion for teachers and bureaucrats. Soon her parents were calling her Fay, though, and she went through a couple of other married names (Davies, Bateman) before marrying Ron Weldon in the early 1960s. She grew up in New Zealand. Her physician father left home for another woman, and her mother took a variety of jobs (including novelist) to keep herself and two daughters alive. Young Fay was a voracious reader (she broke the code at age three) and survived childhood bouts of polio, sibling rivalry, brainless and humorless teachers, and crushes on classmates, mostly other girls. After a variety of family crises and an unexpected inheritance right out of Dickens, the Weldon women moved in the late 1940s to England, where Fay continued her schooling and began to think about being a writer. By 1952 she had an MA in economics and psychology; thereafter she held so many jobs that a list of them could form a sort of Yellow Pages of failure. She wrote ads for eggs, bras, and hair conditioner. She wrote the pilot for Upstairs, Downstairs but was fired, she claims, when the producers decided they wanted to dull the edge of her satiric blade. She experimented sexually, found many men wanting, found herself pregnant, and made a number of other mistakes with a potpourri of inappropriate partners, the most bizarre of whom was Husband #2, who eschewed sex and opined that many married couples had nosexual relations. Amusingly, Weldon writes about herself in the third person in these passages. Fact or fiction, Weldon still draws blood with her biting prose. Agent: Emma Parry/Carlisle & Co.
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