Moab Is My Washpot
Ratings28
Average rating4
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. From the Hardcover edition.
Series
Featured Series
3 primary booksMemoir
Memoir is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 1997 with contributions by Stephen Fry.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
Fry's tangents and monologues are very charming when he speaks, less charming in the written form.
This is utterly candid and revealing. The audiobook is read by Stephen Fry himself, which, in this instance, makes it all the more enjoyable. It's quite incredible how open and honest he is in this book, although I suppose that's what autobiographies are all about.
This follows the first 20 years of his life and gives a great insight into what it's like at prep school amongst other things. I didn't even know what a prep school was, so it was most interesting for me.
I read this alongside his new autobiography and enjoyed one as much as the other.
Whatever your expectations for this book, it will outstrip them. No, that's an understatement. It will take those expectations, multiply them with a factor of 10 or so, take you through 60s England, through the land of schoolboy mischief and lies and heartbreak, show you kindness and compassion along the way, go off on tangents about music and madness and philosophy,and leave you with mad props and respect and love for one Mr. Fry.
For that is the heart of it, of this book and of the writing and all that contained therein: Stephen Fry. Incredibly funny, witty, kind, compassionate, brutally honest and very, very clever.
This is deceptively titled as an autobiography, for it is much, much more than that. Yes, it is a book chronicling the first 20 years of Stephen's life, no doubt - but it is also a book that goes much beyond the life of one schoolboy and into the wild territory of intellectual passions and real world cruelties. Stephen is prone to going off on tangents now and then on anything that tickles his fancy, in the best way possible.
He has more than a way with words, one of the chief reasons why reading this book is such an enjoyable experience. It is a delight to watch Stephen go about anecdotes and essays, conversations and explanations as he weaves his web of verbal dexterity, balances on a trapeze of mental kickbacks and does tricks with words.
Hail Stephen Fry.
