Auto da Fay: A Memoir - Softcover

Weldon, Fay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802141420 ISBN 13: 9780802141422

Publisher: Grove Press, 2004

Synopsis

Fay Weldon, one of England's best-selling and most celebrated authors, looks back on her life as wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, and bon vivant in this funny and engaging memoir. She writes brilliantly about her upbringing in New Zealand, as young and poor girl in London, as an unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, and winer-and-diner: there is little ground she's failed to cover.

Brought up among women-her intrepid mother, grandmother, and sister-Weldon found men a mystery until the swinging-sixties London introduced her to the indecent, the hopeless, and the golden-footed. A central figure among the Bohemian writers and artists of the sixties, she has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.

Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor role as was generally absent. Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. Weldon's family, it turns out, has an impressive literary pedigree; her grandfather, Edgar, Uncle Selwyn and, for a brief while, her mother were all novelists. Arriving in London from New Zealand, just after the Second World War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant in a grand house-the experience of living below stairs later helped Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

After graduating from St. Andrews University, Weldon worked in the Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying the conventions of the times, she remained a single parent. She struggled, living in poverty in post-war London made all the more grinding since she was trying to maintain respectability. Following a stint at the Daily Mirror, she drifted into advertising before desperately entering into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience-a marriage so dreadful she writes of it in the third person as if writing about characters in a novel. With cool, unwavering honesty she details the truly crushing experience of being hitched to a celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy West End nightclub. She escapes eventually, and finds true love at thirty after meeting Ron Weldon at a party. When this union, too, comes to an end, Fay's packed enough experience into her life to begin her career as a writer. She develops into a bohemian intellectual, and works alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David Wevill and Peter Porter, pens winning advertising slogans, and truly begins writing seriously. Fay closes her riveting memoir as she drops what will be her first success, a television play, into a Regents Park mailbox on her way to the hospital to give birth. The play will be the first of many triumphs for a writer whose provocative oeuvre has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.

About this title

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.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802141420
• ISBN 13: 9780802141422
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384