Auto da Fay by Fay Wheldon - 8/11/2003
Aug. 11th, 2003 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zalenaI have no reason to adore Fay Wheldon aside from her marvelous Letters to Alice Upon First Reading Jane Austen, which is a book I would recommend to ANY reader who enjoys Jane Austen. An epistlary novel, the book bridges the gap between fiction and essay and really puts the work of Jane Austen into context.
Fay Wheldon's autobiography was recently released, and I managed to score a copy at the public library. I gobbled it up in a weekend, which was probably reading too fast. I'm used to reading children's books and finishing them quickly. Sometimes I forget it takes a little more time and mental fortitude to conquer a book for adults.
The first half of the autobiography deals with Fay's family history and her childhood spent in New Zealand. She comes from a family of bohemian intellectuals who were into Free Love, Fabianism, and all that sort of Life Force nonesense at the turn of the last century. It made for an interesting and rather unstable family life. Although she was born in the early 1930s, her parents divorced shortly after her birth and she spent the majority of her childhood living in relative poverty with her mother. They moved frequently, usually from house to house, but Fay felt stable, spending her summers with her father, and attending one of the three different schools based around the own square.
After the end of WWII, her mother received an inheritance from a wealthy relative. Rather than buying a house, she used the inheritance to buy passage back to England for the entire family. The England they returned to was not the England her mother left 15 years before. The country was wartorn and impoverished. They went from relative poverty in a warm climate to more extreme poverty in a cold country with limited resources.
At this point, Fay is 15, and the book, along with her life, takes a turn for the worse. Fay manages to put herself through college, receiving a degree in Economics and Psychology. But the year of her graduation, 1952, is not a progressive time. She has problems finding a job, and winds up pregnant, in a time and place not friendly towards single mothers.
Wheldon, who claims to feel little affinity with herself from that time, refers to herself in third person for this portion of the book, discussing the many upheavals, hauntings, and self-destructive sexual behavior that took place as she tried to pull her life together and keep her family from falling apart.
Finally, Fay, who goes through a number of name changes throughout the course of the book as her marital and professional status changes, meets her future husband, by the name of Wheldon, and sends out what is to become the beginning of her writing career, and the book ends abruptly.
The details, names, places, etc. in this second half of the book are muddled and unclear. I found the material to be uncomfortable, as does Wheldon herself. As to the eventual breakup of her marriage to Wheldon, and her subsequent pairing with husband #3 (Fox), nothing is said. The second half raises more questions than it answers, and I almost wish I hadn't read it, since it seems to ruin what came before.
Anyway, I imagine this book could interst those who are not already fans of Fay Wheldon, but I think it is best suiting towards those who know her life and literature better than I do myself.
Overall rating: B - intriguing, but frustratingly incomplete.
Fay Wheldon's autobiography was recently released, and I managed to score a copy at the public library. I gobbled it up in a weekend, which was probably reading too fast. I'm used to reading children's books and finishing them quickly. Sometimes I forget it takes a little more time and mental fortitude to conquer a book for adults.
The first half of the autobiography deals with Fay's family history and her childhood spent in New Zealand. She comes from a family of bohemian intellectuals who were into Free Love, Fabianism, and all that sort of Life Force nonesense at the turn of the last century. It made for an interesting and rather unstable family life. Although she was born in the early 1930s, her parents divorced shortly after her birth and she spent the majority of her childhood living in relative poverty with her mother. They moved frequently, usually from house to house, but Fay felt stable, spending her summers with her father, and attending one of the three different schools based around the own square.
After the end of WWII, her mother received an inheritance from a wealthy relative. Rather than buying a house, she used the inheritance to buy passage back to England for the entire family. The England they returned to was not the England her mother left 15 years before. The country was wartorn and impoverished. They went from relative poverty in a warm climate to more extreme poverty in a cold country with limited resources.
At this point, Fay is 15, and the book, along with her life, takes a turn for the worse. Fay manages to put herself through college, receiving a degree in Economics and Psychology. But the year of her graduation, 1952, is not a progressive time. She has problems finding a job, and winds up pregnant, in a time and place not friendly towards single mothers.
Wheldon, who claims to feel little affinity with herself from that time, refers to herself in third person for this portion of the book, discussing the many upheavals, hauntings, and self-destructive sexual behavior that took place as she tried to pull her life together and keep her family from falling apart.
Finally, Fay, who goes through a number of name changes throughout the course of the book as her marital and professional status changes, meets her future husband, by the name of Wheldon, and sends out what is to become the beginning of her writing career, and the book ends abruptly.
The details, names, places, etc. in this second half of the book are muddled and unclear. I found the material to be uncomfortable, as does Wheldon herself. As to the eventual breakup of her marriage to Wheldon, and her subsequent pairing with husband #3 (Fox), nothing is said. The second half raises more questions than it answers, and I almost wish I hadn't read it, since it seems to ruin what came before.
Anyway, I imagine this book could interst those who are not already fans of Fay Wheldon, but I think it is best suiting towards those who know her life and literature better than I do myself.
Overall rating: B - intriguing, but frustratingly incomplete.
