My Animal Life [Paperback]

Another author's autobiography might have portrayed a youth of unremitting happiness, sunlit tennis courts, dances at the yacht club after regattas, parents (if alluded to at all) sharing a strife-free marriage, while excluding reference to agents dropping him from their lists, publishers rejecting his books, the despair attending his lonely, repetitive, daily stumbling-for-words and unending battle to maintain confidence in his craft. Nor would he have alluded to his sexual adventures. The result would be a far less honest and interesting memoir than Maggie Gee's "My Animal Life".

We meet her "working class through and through" parents and vividly described extended family. "Grandma Gee comes rocking towards me like a full-bosomed sea-legged sailor, all dimples, raising her hat to release a thin froth of curled white hair, but, suddenly fretful, calls, `Pa! Pa! will you hang this up?' - her small navy head-hugging straw hat with the long pearl hairpin."

We watch her father Vic take them by a sequence of job promotions from "outdoor plumbing and the narrowness of terraces" in Wolverton Bucks to a detached two-storey three-bedroom house in Sussex and follow her trajectory through a sequence of state schools to a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, and on to publishing eleven novels, including "The White Family", which was short-listed for the Orange Prize, "The Flood", "My Cleaner" and "My Driver". Despite her middle-class education and profession and marriage to a middle-class husband, though, she insists that "at the core of her adult life" she "remains" an "outsider looking slightly askance at what the privileged get up to".

The vividly described clothes her grandmother and aunts made for her, which "helped [her] to be a girl", a "gathered skirt with buttoned over the shoulder straps", a "bibbed swimsuit, orange with a sharp white edge", a "Peter Pan collar decorated with palest blue 'S' bending ric-rac braid", a "wonderfully busy cardigan with eight large cats' faces knitted in relief, with green and embroidered whiskers, and the neck and cuffs edged with knitted piecrust frills in scarlet, drawn in with scarlet threads finished with pom-poms" (described as a "work of art"), left me reeling with incomprehension - but fascinated, like a spectator at an exotic tournament groping to understand what he is viewing. I wonder how many grandmothers and aunts still knit clothes for their grandchildren and nieces?

I admire Maggie Gee's writing immensely and adore her satire. ("Tony Blair ... likes war so much, because he does not live in a country like Uganda, which has four wars going on at once ... And he likes our President Museveni, and so does Mr Bush, when he comes to visit. They all like war, and so they all get on.") I wonder, however, if she is not too hard on her father? Vic loved his wife and children as their paterfamilial protector. He worked hard all his days for them. Perhaps her own high standards led her to expect perfection. Withal, "My Animal Life" is a wonderfully readable book - as Doris Lessing said of "My Driver", "worldly, witty, enjoyable [and] impressive".

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