Moab Is My Washpot: An Autobiography

A number one bestseller in Britain that topped the lists there for months, Stephen Fry's astonishingly frank, funny, wise memoir is the book that his fans everywhere have been waiting for. Since his PBS television debut in the Blackadder series, the American profile of this multitalented writer, actor and comedian has grown steadily, especially in the wake of his title role in the film Wilde, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and his supporting role in A Civil Action.
        
Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion.
        
This extraordinary and affecting book has "a tragic grandeur that lifts it to classic status," raved the Financial Times in one of the many ecstatic British reviews. Stephen Fry's autobiography, in turns funny, shocking, sad, bruisingly frank and always compulsively readable, could well become a classic gay coming-of-age memoir.

Stephen Fry no longer steals, cheats or lies nearly as much as he used to. He still talks too much, and he still has an annoying flop of schoolboy hair that seventeen of London's most expensive and absurd hairdressers have been able to do nothing about.

Fry has written three novels--The Liar, The Hippopotamus and Making History--and played Peter in the film Peter's Friends, Wilde in the film Wilde, Jeeves in the television series Jeeves & Wooster, and (a closely guarded show-business secret, this) Laurie in the TV series A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
        
Much of his past life is contained between the covers of the book you are now holding; much of his present life is spent trying to be good. He rarely succeeds, yet still he tries. He divides his time between New York and his English homes in London and Norfolk.