Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter

Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter

3.46 of 5 stars 3.46  ·  rating details  ·  476 ratings  ·  155 reviews
A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser.

In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insig

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Hardcover, 328 pages
Published February 1st 2010 by George Weidenfeld & Nicholson
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Community Reviews

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Petra X
Memoir of a marriage between two people at the top of the literary game who had spouses, six children between them when they met, but cared more for each other than them. After their first meeting Pinter said to the author, "Must you go?" and the lust became an affair became marriage. 33 years of being in love, not just loving.

True love sometimes involves hurting others, when should we do our duty and when should we be true to ourselves? Antonia Fraser never addresses this or any other question...more
Jenny Brown
Real Housewives of Literary London.

I have rarely been this disappointed in a book. If reading a daytimer gets you off, you'll love it. But if you want to know what people were thinking and feeling while committing adultery, leaving their 6 kids behind, and dining with the rich famous, you're out of luck.

The author gives us no insight into why she fell so in love and her behavior comes across as selfish and blind to the needs of others. She drops names without any explanation of who they might be...more
Seth
I enjoyed following the ebb and flow of Harold Pinter's and Antonia Fraser's 30+ years together. Fraser has successfully and naturally documented how they dedicated their lives to sharing myriad successes, failures, joys and hardships. Fraser maintains an honesty and matter-of-factness throughout. This not only makes their love feel familiar but also humanizes the circles in which Pinter and Fraser circulate - circles populated with an extraordinary cast of political leaders, intelligentsia, aut...more
Laura
Jan 15, 2010 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition Recommends it for: Bettie
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Bronwyn
Only 15 pages in, but already I want to devote my life (OK, well the next week) to reading this book.
David
I had forgotten that Antonia Fraser had written a memoir of her life with Harold Pinter. So when I opened a present from one of our neighbours at Christmas and found "Must You Go", I was both surprised and delighted. It is actually a wonderful story of their thirty three years together. What started as an affair in 1975 became a marriage which is described as a wonderful love story until Harold's death in 2008. The book is based on Antonia's diaries, and these are quoted verbatim with occasional...more
Mam
Was there ever a better, or more bittersweet title for a widow's memoir? Fraser tells us she chose her title because it was what Harold Pinter asked her as she left after their first encounter. A lovely arc.

I wanted the memoir to be as lovely as the title suggested, especially because Fraser says she complied most of the memoir from the diaries she kept throughout their long marriage. After all, this is the story of two married prominent people, one the mother of six children, who were so besott...more
Kristine
Antonia Fraser, born in London in 1932, is a Brit of privilege ("Lady" Antonia Fraser); historian; successful writer in various genres (non-fiction includes The Weaker Vessel, The Warrior Queens, Marie Antoinette; detective fiction includes Quiet as a Nun and other Jemima Shore books); mother of six children by first husband Sir Hugh Fraser (b. 1918) who was an MP in The House of Commons from 1945-1984 and step-mother of one by her second husband, the 1975 Nobel Laureate/playwright and screenwr...more
Christine Rebbert
I wasn't sure at first if I was going to get through this. I know who "Lady" Antonia Fraser is; I have a lot of her books, although I don't believe I've actually read any of them. I also know who Harold Pinter is and that he was a genius, etc., etc., but never "looked into him" beyond the barest essentials. So I "knew" both people involved in this chronological telling of their lives together as culled from Fraser's journals from 1975 to 2009, but didn't have a lot of detail. At first, their get...more
Fred Moramarco
Hemingway wrote somewhere that when two people are deeply in love, it is
Inevitable that their story will end in tragedy, since one will quite likely out-
live the other. I've been thinking about this recently because in the last few years I've read a handful of books by widows who were in deeply reciprocated love relationships and who write about those relationships in retrospect with great affection and a deep sense of loss. These books include Joan Didion's The Year of Living Dangerously, Sandr...more
Lois


Harold Pinter was a great (Nobel Prize winning) playwright and political activist and this is a marvelous portrait of him. When he and Antonia Fraser, a fine historian and biographer, met and fell in love they had both been married for over 20 years. His wife was a famous actress and her husband was a Conservative MP. They both had children - she had SIX.
The book is based on her diary entries, and for a time I wondered about those children and became a bit weary of so many notes of socializing...more
Karen
Award winning writer Lady Antonia Frasier had “met” playwright Harold Pinter several times before they both found themselves guests at a dinner party on January 8, 1975. Lady Antonia’s life would change when, as she was leaving the party, she heard Pinter say to her “Must you go?”

These three words started their relationship and inspired the title of this book. In Must You Go? we see the relationship span over thirty years and we see them through their separate divorces. Lady Antonia, best known...more
Kasa Cotugno
Who can resist a rollicking, passionate love story, but even more so, when the characters are vital, alive and have so many dimensions as this karmic couple. Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter are level headed, famous and accomplished, married quite happily to others, when they meet in 1975 and are immediately transfixed, experiencing an instant magnetism that blazes off the page. The words in the haunting title, "Must You Go," were actually spoken from him to her that fateful night following an o...more
Yooperprof
It is what it is: 300 pages of good gossipy reading, about one of the most famous literary couples of the last 35 years. A brilliant playwright of the "kitchen sink school", Pinter acheived the remarkable feat of being mentioned in a great Stephen Sondheim song shortly after he turned 40. ("The Ladies Who Lunch", from "Company.") He went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. Fraser - born in 1932 - is a popular and admired historian and biographer, often writing about powerful women...more
Bookmarks Magazine
This "bold, intimate, madly entertaining memoir" (Entertainment Weekly) is not so much a biography as a collection of radiant fragments detailing a life devoted to -- and lived as -- art. "There are very few grilled-cheese sandwiches eaten thoughtlessly over the sink in this account," muses the Washington Post, but there are plenty of family holidays, charity events, cricket matches, and dinners with Samuel Beckett, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie -- too many, perhaps, for the New York Times....more
Ann
Please call her "Lady" Antonia, after all, her father was an Earl. She relates that she was quite relieved when at a dinner party the host correctly sat her to his right; the rightful place for the daughter of an Earl. Did she mention she is the daughter of an Earl? No doubt a fascinating life, lived around the best and the brightest. But this person is everything wrong with the British class system. Not a mention about how leaving her six (6!) small children might have affected them. Hmmmm. Gue...more
Philip
Got an advance reading copy of this today and thought it would make a nice break from my recent reading - neither Pinter nor Fraser were high-profile celebrities when they met and left their respective spouses for each other in 1975 (and he was the more famous of the two at the time) but apparently the press had a field-day.

7/30/10: Despite the circumstances under which their relationship began, the Pinters' relationship was apparently very successful - they apparently adored each other and seld...more
Leendert
precious precious people. started out well, but i was annoyed beyond belief by the end of it. finishing this book was a chore and perhaps a way of making sure i'll remember never to read anything about pinter again.

maybe that's a bit strong.

but really - a guy who labors for days over those sort of poems included in the memoir and can still win a nobel, albeit as a playwright, really?

the whole thing of screeching for the rights of the repressed and dispossessed, whilst living a life of luxury, d...more
Ellen Herbert
Have started my reading year with what may well be one of the top books ever completely relished and enjoyed.
Antonia Fraser has long been a favorite biographer and here she documents her life with Harold Pinter drawing from her recollections and Diary that she has kept assiduously through-out her life.

Not sentimental, but heart-wrenchingly real - recounting a courtship wrought with heartache and scandal and a long, creative and fearless union lived privately and quite in the public view. Human...more
Ruth Harper
I picked this up on the remainder table at Barnes and Noble. It is a bit like reading the thinking person's "People Magazine" -- or issues from the UK in the years 1975-2008. Perhaps I am saying that this book was a bit of a guilty pleasure. Writer Antonia Fraser was married, Catholic, and the mother of six children when she met playwright Harold Pinter, also married, culturally Jewish, the father of one son. Their mutual attraction initially led to scandal and eventually became marriage and a l...more
Elizabeth Hawley
I first heard about this book on NPR and immediately put it onto my list of to-read books, so when I saw it on sale at a closing bookstore, I had to pick it up. It's based primarily on diary entries, and for the first half of the book, those entries are in bits and pieces, with more sentence fragments than complete sentences, which I admit drove me a little crazy. But the glimpse at their lives was enough to draw me in and keep me going (well, that and the fact that honestly, I never stop readin...more
Pamela
In "Must You Go?," Antonia Fraser uses her diaries to tell the story of her relationship with the playwright Harold Pinter. This is not a biography of Pinter nor is it a memoir of Fraser’s life. This is all about their relationship - how they met, how they got together, and how they made their relationship work for over 30 years. It is obvious from Fraser’s diaries that they were very much in love, they respected each other’s talents, and were a support for each other. Many of the entries sound...more
Judy
Antonia Fraser was a respected author, wife of a Conservative Member of Parliament, and the mother of six children and Harold Pinter was a celebrated playwright, married to a well-known actress, and father of a son when they met in 1975. They fell in love, quickly divorced their spouses, and married. Their love story lasted for 33 years until Pinter's death in 1975. This memoir of their love story is based on Fraser' diaries. While it details their activities and literary successes over their pe...more
Silvio111
A totally charming and inspiring memoir of a biographer and writer of her life with "Britain's foremost playwrite," Harold Pinter. If you think you know Pinter from his rather grim plays, you will see him from another angle by reading Fraser's diary notes and later comments about him, in which he appears as a boyant, joyous, romantic, cricket-loving, and just slightly neurotic person who "becomes so happy" when he is working on a new play, and who repeatedly tells Fraser that he is "The luckiest...more
Iva
Fraser's documentation of her life with Harold Pinter is the result of a diary kept since January 1975 when they met. These well-chosen excerpts are honest, never bragging about herself, in spite of her success as a writer. For example, when mentioning a lunch at Buckingham Palace, it is about the smart conversation, not that she was impressed with being at the Palace. Though she had six children with Member of Parliament Hugh Fraser, there are no photos of any of them and no mention of how they...more
Nick
The perfect literary memoir. Lots of name-dropping, acid commentary, and snobbish put-downs. Delicious fun, and the occasional insight into Pinter's extraordinary oeuvre. What Fraser is best at is conveying her love for Pinter and her awe of his creative process. Although she never says so directly, it's clear that she considers herself a good writer, a professional, and Pinter something else -- a genius. It's a love story that endured for more than 3 decades, from the rocky beginnings back when...more
Karen
I alternately loved and was bored by this book. First off I listened to it on my iPod which can sometimes give you a very different perspective on a book. The story is primarily told via entries in Antonia's journals, but it is like someone reading their journal to you but editing out the parts they don't want to share. It truly is her life with Harold Pinter but I found myself longing to know more about the rest of her life as well. There are reference to her 6 children but because they are spa...more
False Millennium
I've read most of Antonia Fraser's biographical histories. I remember seeing photographs of her in the 1960's when she was married to Hugh, her Scottish Lord, and her six little bairns all in kilts, in London. I'd never really given much thought to Harold Pinter other than "British Playright," but she certainly presented their love affair and subsequent marriage with touching comprehension; enough that I went and looked at some Harold Pinter interviews on You Tube and can now well understand her...more
Julie Mackin
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Elizabeth L.
Bought this for my mom for Christmas; someone else bought it for her, so I grabbed the non-gift copy and read it during the hols. Came away with a few realizations:

1. Fraser doth protest too much: she IS a Mitford character come to life.
2. I really need to be better acquainted with Pinter's work.
3. London is a small town if you're a literato.
4. Their love was profound, home-wrecking, poem-making, enduring, gorgeous etc. and I don't mean to diminish it in any way but it was so clearly made possib...more
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Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter (Hardcover)
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Lady Antonia Fraser (Pinter), CBE, is a British author of history and novels, best known as Antonia Fraser for writing biographies and detective fiction, and the second wife of Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Series:
* Jemima Shore
More about Antonia Fraser...
Marie Antoinette: The Journey The Wives of Henry VIII Mary Queen of Scots Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King The Warrior Queens

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