The second volume of Stephen Fry's memoirs recalls his Cambridge years and rise to fame in perfect prose and excruciating honesty
That Stephen Fry needs no introduction is what he has always wanted. He is writing today, of course, from a position of fame, but the period which this, the second volume of his autobiography, covers is the decade or so after he'd done his shameful late-teen jail stint for credit-card theft, and made it, despite his appetites, his addiction, his self-admitted "slyness", to Cambridge, last of his last chances, and with the world before him to either trample or embrace.
What follows is many things: a grand reminiscence of college and theatre and comedyland in the 1980s, with tone-perfect showbiz anecdotes, and genuine readerly excitement as we try to forget that we know what happened next; a rehabilitation, for Fry himself, as he finds himself becoming genuinely popular, and genuinely good at some things – acting of a limited sort, sketch-writing, hard, hard work – rather than just "being clever". And through all of it he tells us, with exemplary and often exruciating honesty, of his crippling self-doubts, his needinesses, the greed of his addictions, his drive, shallow though he knew it was, for fame. What Fry does, essentially, is tell us who he really is. He knows he's always been seen, by friends and enemies alike, as confident, quintessentially English, languorously zing-full of bons mots, at ease in any surroundings. Inside, he says, there's an often terrified half-Jew poof, horrified by the unattractiveness of his body, unable to smile sweetly without looking smug, knowing he's been given a second chance and filled with terror at the thought of blowing it.
Even he knows he's straying towards reader-unfriendly territory by spending three pages exploring his personal angsts during a time when, say, he's just had his first play put on at the fringe, or been head-hunted for a new radio show. So he gets his retaliation in first, explaining why he's explaining it all, and making it even more fascinating, before giving us another story about a BBC producer, or how musicals get written, or his tennis-match theory of sitcoms and thus why the very first Black Adder didn't work. The mix is perfect.
Full piece at The Observer.
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