A great memoir should be an unflinching mirror
To celebrate a golden year for autobiography, our critic offers his top 10 British classics of the genre

Robert McCrum, The Observer, Sunday 12 September 2010

John Osborne, photographed for the Observer by Jane Bown in 1991, ‘eviscerated his poor old mum and his ex-wife Jill Bennett, but he flayed himself too’. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer


The British book trade sometimes can seem strangely reminiscent of an elderly alcoholic: sagging features, grey skin, listless eyes, and a general air of defeat. But then, one quiet snorter and – hey presto! – it's party time.

Right now, it's doubles all round. A year ago, celebrity memoirs were in the tank, the bane of the business. Nothing sold. This year: Mandelson and Blair, followed by Fry, Dannatt etc… Christmas has come early.


At a stroke, the prince of darkness and the former PM have revived a genre with a distinguished pedigree. Not as dazzling at Denis Healey (The Time of My Life) nor as authentic as John Major (The Autobiography) nor as elegant as Harold Macmillan's six volumes, but Mandelson's The Third Man (HarperCollins) and Blair's A Journey (Hutchinson), both horribly flawed in quite different ways, are still compelling documents by two key players from an extraordinary era in British politics. Of course the reading public is interested.

What do we expect from a memoir? Gossip, certainly; revelations and characters, yes; wit, please; a whiff of nostalgia, perhaps. Inevitably, there will be lies, vanity and betrayal: that's part of the frisson. Probably the one quality I look for in the author of a great autobiography is that he or she should be as merciless on themselves as on their adversaries. The great memoirist should face themselves in the mirror with an unflinching gaze.

The poster-boy of the self-pitiless autobiography is John Osborne in A Better Class of Person and Almost A Gentleman. Yes, he eviscerated Nellie, his poor old mum, and Jill Bennett ("Adolf"), an ex-wife, but he flayed himself, too. Osborne was a true artist and did not, to paraphrase Auden, confuse art with magic, as some try to do. For Osborne, art was a mirror whose proper effect was disenchantment. Searing honesty was Osborne's calling card.

There are other kinds of candid autobiography that have charm as well as integrity. Churchill's My Early Life stands out, not least because he was a master of prose and always a delight to read. Published in 1930, after newspaper serialisation on both sides of the Atlantic, Churchill's memoir was contemporaneous with another inter-war classic, Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man.

The full McCrum piece here.