Experience (2000) is the memoir of author Martin Amis, son of British writer Kingsley Amis. He mentions famous people, such as Clive James, Saul Bellow, Daniel Day Lewis, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, John Travolta, and many more, but this is predominantly a family memoir.
Through letters, Martin Amis writes about the relationship with his father throughout his childhood, and his university and work years. He writes of his two young sons and compares his parenting to his father’s parenting of Philip, Martin (himself), and Sally.
Martin began this memoir in 1997, two years after his father’s death in 1995, and it was published in 2000, the year of his sister’s death at the age of forty-six.
He doesn’t shy away from his father’s controversial attitudes, his lack of tolerance, the divorces to his two wives – Martin’s mother Hilary in 1965 when he was twelve and Elizabeth Jane in 1983 – and his father’s phobias, such as aerophobia, acrophobia, nyctophobia, and monophobia.
Martin also mentions his daughter Delilah Seale, whom he did not see until she was nineteen years old.
However, surprisingly this is also a memoir of his cousin Lucy Katherine Partington, and to set straight the misrepresentations of her. Twenty years before the police interrogation tapes were printed in the press in 1994, when they brought killer Frederick West to justice, readers knew about the murderer, but not the people who died, especially Lucy Katherine.
In December 1973, Lucy went missing at the age of twenty-one. She was abducted by one of Britain’s most prolific murders – Frederick West. Martin Amis wants people to know who she was, and how she lived, so that she does not remain a statistic. She was in her last year at Exeter University, studying English.
This memoir won the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 for his first book, published in 1973, The Rachel Papers, the same award that his father won twenty years earlier in 1954 for his first book Lucky Jim.
This is an interesting memoir – focusing not so much on his siblings and children, but predominantly on the people “missing” in his life – his mother Hilary Bardwell, his father Kingsley Amis, his cousin Lucy Katherine Partington, and his daughter Delilah Seale. The style is not one that I like, mainly because it is not a typical memoir, nor autobiography. However, I enjoyed the references to his father and to other writers, particularly the evolving process of writing.
MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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