A Life Of My Own by Claire Tomalin (Viking, £16.99)
Vivid, insightful and backed by painstaking research, Tomalin’s historical biographies have been bestsellers and won a host of awards – the Whitbread, Hawthornden and James Tait Black Memorial prizes.
Here she tackles a much trickier subject: herself. Tomalin immediately admits, “Writing about myself has not been easy. I have tried to be as truthful as possible, which has meant moving between the trivial and the tragic in a way that could seem callous.”
Claire Delavenay was born in 1933. Her French father worked for the BBC and the United Nations and her British mother was a musician and composer. It was not a harmonious marriage. “As long as they were together, they poisoned one another; apart, they were restored to sanity,” she writes.
Her own first marriage was equally tempestuous. She met the charismatic, restless Nick Tomalin at Cambridge where she was studying English. They married when they were just 20 and started a family immediately. They had two daughters, Josephine and Susanna, but their son, Daniel, died when he was six weeks old. Emily and Tom, who has spina bifida, came along later, but the marriage was already in trouble, “I was driven to make progress in my career by my first husband’s not infrequent decisions to abandon the family.”
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Nick was unfaithful and often absent and Claire started to seek happiness in her work. She found a job as a reader for publisher William Heinemann (she was later told she got the job because she scored seven out of 10 for her looks) and gradually became immersed in literary life.
She became the literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, working with Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes and Martin Amis (with whom she had a brief affair), but there’s a distinct lack of gossipy revelation and atmosphere in the book. It’s a more workaday roll call of who worked where and when.
Now 84 and happily married to the writer Michael Frayn (“We encourage one another to keep walking and working”), she recalls her griefs – the death of her first husband in Syria and Susanna’s suicide (“I don’t think there has been a day since her death when I have not thought of her”) – and her hopes to “begin another book if possible when this one is finished”.
A Life Of My Own is a measured account of a life, but it lacks the glint and glimmer that make Claire Tomalin’s historical biographies so successful.