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lazygal's review against another edition
3.0
I was interested to read this for two reasons: first, because of all my senses, losing my sight would be (I think) the worst and second, because she lost her sight thanks to a blethorspasm, which my paternal grandmother suffered from for the last years of her life (she was in the clinical trials for Botox, which started out as a medical tool before becoming the means for Real Housewives and starlets to look as stupid and wooden as they act). What a surprise to learn that her blindness forms a very minor part of this memoir.
Ms. McWilliam has definitely "swallowed a dictionary" - reading this without one next to you is only for the very well read, the highly vocabularied or the brave. Words like churlishly, impastoed, fusty and occludes litter the text (those were chosen at random by opening the book on four pages and looking). She is also a premiere name dropper - one can see why people kept telling her to write her memoir. She's friends with writers like Julian Barnes and Christopher Hitchens, celebrities like Tamasin Day-Lewis, almost family to the Baron of Strancona and Mont Royal, once married to the Earl of Portsmouth.
The first two thirds of this memoir have little in the way of self-reflection as she takes readers from her Edinburgh childhood through her blindness. The last third has more reflection and more about the blindness (the Botox doesn't work and she had a radical, new operation to try to cure the problem) but there's little about how she copes with this disability.
Rambling, moving back and forth in time, these snippets are chatty and engaging. This memoir is a non-linear one, which may annoy or confuse readers.
ARC provided by publisher.
Ms. McWilliam has definitely "swallowed a dictionary" - reading this without one next to you is only for the very well read, the highly vocabularied or the brave. Words like churlishly, impastoed, fusty and occludes litter the text (those were chosen at random by opening the book on four pages and looking). She is also a premiere name dropper - one can see why people kept telling her to write her memoir. She's friends with writers like Julian Barnes and Christopher Hitchens, celebrities like Tamasin Day-Lewis, almost family to the Baron of Strancona and Mont Royal, once married to the Earl of Portsmouth.
The first two thirds of this memoir have little in the way of self-reflection as she takes readers from her Edinburgh childhood through her blindness. The last third has more reflection and more about the blindness (the Botox doesn't work and she had a radical, new operation to try to cure the problem) but there's little about how she copes with this disability.
Rambling, moving back and forth in time, these snippets are chatty and engaging. This memoir is a non-linear one, which may annoy or confuse readers.
ARC provided by publisher.
marybethbutler's review against another edition
5.0
This is purely a delicious book. I refer, here, to the writing. It's like eating something very, very dense and creamy and a bit sweet. I sense that I am missing a lot because I keep pushing through that wonderful prose. This is a literary book, both in the subject matter and in the writing.
The story is fascinating, horrifying, bewildering. I'm not finished with the book yet; I suspect I'll have more to say. Just a note for now.
The story is fascinating, horrifying, bewildering. I'm not finished with the book yet; I suspect I'll have more to say. Just a note for now.
badcushion's review
2.0
I rarely get this far into a book and then quit, but I'm making an exception for this one. On the one hand, it is a well written, often funny, exceedingly literate memoir, and I wouldn't blame anyone for actually wanting to read it all the way through. On the other hand, the further in I got, the more this turned into a very specific kind of British book, where everyone is the precocious child of a terribly famous poet or themselves a fashion model of exceeding beauty who also curates greek sculpture at the V and A or some damn thing, and one is always running into Christopher Hitchens or sending a story to Auberon Waugh to get published, yet nobody actually seems to WORK, instead fetching up accidentally into the architecturally charming outbuildings of various stately homes which are being rented out to them in their time of need by the former nanny of some branch of the royal family...basically, the same British book that seemed more original maybe sixty years ago (since this type of book is very common among those written by people growing up between the wars in a certain strata of society, except then it was Evelyn Waugh, but otherwise the same). I decided i needed to get the hell out when she actually uses the word 'Orientals' and talks about how certain numbers are good fortune to them, which is language I expect in a book about being sent down from Oxford in the thirties, but not so much in the modern era.
In short: if you have not already read this book, you may enjoy this version of it. Otherwise, there are both fiction and non fiction versions of this, and speaking of Waugh, may I recommend Brideshead Revisited?
In short: if you have not already read this book, you may enjoy this version of it. Otherwise, there are both fiction and non fiction versions of this, and speaking of Waugh, may I recommend Brideshead Revisited?
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