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Moab Is My Washpot

4.05 of 5 stars 4.05 · rating details · 7,397 ratings · 511 reviews

"One of the most poignant, funny, intelligent, frank and horribly addictive books you're likely to read all year."
--Sunday Telegraph

"Stephen Fry is one of the great originals... This autobiography of his first twenty years is a pleasure to read, mixing outrageous acts with sensible opinions in bewildering confusion... That so much outward charm, self-awareness and intelle...more

Hardcover, 320 pages

Published November 18th 1997 by Hutchinson (first published 1997)

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Sep 27, 2008 Trevor rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, literature

In Foucault’s The History of Sexuality there is a chapter where (and I’m simplifying and summarising, possibly far too much) he compares Eastern and Western ways of sex. Basically in the East people are ‘initiated’ into sex – they are taught sex as one might be taught to dance. No one is expected to just know – it is something you need to learn. In the West we don’t bother with that sort of thing. What we do is turn sex into a science. We feel the need to talk endlessly about sex – Kinsy and Hit...more In Foucault’s The History of Sexuality there is a chapter where (and I’m simplifying and summarising, possibly far too much) he compares Eastern and Western ways of sex. Basically in the East people are ‘initiated’ into sex – they are taught sex as one might be taught to dance. No one is expected to just know – it is something you need to learn. In the West we don’t bother with that sort of thing. What we do is turn sex into a science. We feel the need to talk endlessly about sex – Kinsy and Hite as much as Freud. And most of all, we do love to confess. There is a sense in which a good autobiography is really little more than a good confession. How we ever stopped all being Catholic is quite beyond me – but I never have understood religion. In short then, in the East they like to dance, in the West we like to get the sex over as quick as we can so we can all head down to the pub to tell our mates.

In a review of another of Fry’s books I wrote at the start of the week and before I had started reading this one I said, “The thing I like most about Fry’s writing is that it is disarmingly honest.” Now, you would have thought I would have been primed for a good dose of honesty here – this being his autobiography. But no, this book was infinitely more honest than I had a right to expect.

I enjoyed this book so much – so much that it may become a Christmas present for mum, hard to say. This takes his life up until he was about 20. He is the last person I could imagine ever being in gaol. The idea of him being a thief is even harder to reconcile.

There is a constant air of foreboding about this book. There are dark, dark thunder clouds – virtually always near enough to be heard, but for the most part still on the horizon. The storms never prove to be quite as horrible as they are in anticipation, but the anticipation is beautifully crafted.

I’ve long believed that we are only the vague acquaintances of our former selves – sometimes not even that. Fry brings this point out forcefully in a poem he wrote at 15 to his 25 year old self – the sell out he knew his 25 year old self would have to become. We are obsessed with the myth of the continuity of our ‘self’ – Fry plays with this idea in a fascinating way in the latter parts of this book.

There is remarkably little sex. I would have expected more, to be honest, but prefer that there is not more. If you believe all homosexuals are rampant sex manics you might be a bit disappointed with this book. Fry is perhaps the best known and best loved homosexual in Britain – or maybe that is Alan Bennett? – anyway, I’d have thought that this book would do as much as any to help dispel the eternal evil that is homophobia. I loved his ‘explanation’ of how he knew he was gay – that he never fantasised about having sex with women, only ever with men. This is about the only way anyone can tell their sexuality, I’d have thought.

People might find the swearing more challenging than the sex, though. There are four letter words that begin with F and even with C and both used repeatedly. Because of the frequent use of the C word I’m in the curious position of being able to buy this book for my mother, but not for Lorena. What a funny world we live in.

I’m particularly fond of people holding forth – and Fry does this throughout the book, and then undercuts it all nicely with typically British self-deprecation.

This was a good autobiography, at times quite amusing and at other times quite painful – a bit like life itself really.
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Dec 22, 2008 Rory rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: fans of his

Shelves: memoirs-and-bios

There's no denying that Stephen Fry is absurdly smart, and veddy, veddy funny. I've adored him since he was Jeeves to Hugh Laurie's Wooster. He could annotate a shopping list from 1986 and I'd be enthralled. Of course, his early life was full of much more interesting things--private English schools in the 1970s (a couple of which he was asked to leave), a suicide attempt, early explorations of his homosexuality, earnest struggles to find just where his genius might lie.

I was a tiny bit anguishe...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Lachlan Smith rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Can you imagine being sent to a boarding school 200 miles from where you lived? Well, Stephen Fry doesn’t have to.

Fry’s autobiography, intriguingly entitled Moab is my Washpot, tells of how he managed to live through beatings, expulsion, imprisonment, probation and suicide attempts – all before he was eighteen! He states in the novel that he promised himself he would never write an autobiography unless he was honest throughout and did not try to make himself out as the good guy. Well, he certain...more Can you imagine being sent to a boarding school 200 miles from where you lived? Well, Stephen Fry doesn’t have to.

Fry’s autobiography, intriguingly entitled Moab is my Washpot, tells of how he managed to live through beatings, expulsion, imprisonment, probation and suicide attempts – all before he was eighteen! He states in the novel that he promised himself he would never write an autobiography unless he was honest throughout and did not try to make himself out as the good guy. Well, he certainly didn’t paint himself as the good guy in Moab is my Washpot. He is brutally honest about his school and post-school life, but sometimes to almost an intolerable extent. Some passages leave you wishing you had skipped a few paragraphs, because of the thoughts that were once passing through Fry’s head at the time and the actions of older students at his boarding school – namely “Derwent”.
The tone changes in the middle if the book as he goes deeper into his problems (of which there were many) and shows the very, very dark and troublesome childhood of this otherwise seemingly funny and cheery comedian. He often uses false names for people in his book, to save them much embarrassment.
The last third of the book returns to relative sanity, or at least becomes so interesting that it is hard to put the book down. It explains how and why he turned eighteen (came of age) in a rotten diner, many thousands of miles away from his family.
But despite his criminal activities, Fry emerged a year or so later to be accepted into Cambridge University.
Before you read this you have to know that you will never read another autobiography the same way, if ever. Once you have read his brutally frank book, you will realise that a lot of autobiographies (but by no means all) really do paint the author as the “good guy”. Either that or Stephen Fry was very odd, which you have to ask when you read this excerpt. This was from a letter he wrote to himself at the age of fifteen, not be opened until he was twenty-five:

“Well I tell you now that everything I feel now, everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat”
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Sep 02, 2012 Donna rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-read, audiobook, memoir

Sometimes I like to daydream about who I would invite to my ideal dinner party, and Stephen Fry is always at the top of my list. He's funny, erudite, active, and kind. Basically he's my idea of a perfect man, and of course, he's gay as a Christmas tree. Ah well, you can't get everything in life, and I would settle for a conversation with him.

After hearing Fry read this book, his own autobiography covering the first 20 years or so of his life, I feel like I've had that conversation. I feel like I...more

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Apr 06, 2012 Tony Johnston rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I would find it tough to fully explain why I dislike this book because to do so would require a long essay and frankly, it doesn't deserve that.

In summary, I am very disappointed. Like a lot of people, I had got used to Stephen Fry the "national treasure" and I looked forward to understanding and appreciating a little more of this enigma. The man with millions of Twitter followers.

The problem is, I ended up wishing I hadn't bothered.

On the one hand I found myself disliking the author in a way...more I would find it tough to fully explain why I dislike this book because to do so would require a long essay and frankly, it doesn't deserve that.

In summary, I am very disappointed. Like a lot of people, I had got used to Stephen Fry the "national treasure" and I looked forward to understanding and appreciating a little more of this enigma. The man with millions of Twitter followers.

The problem is, I ended up wishing I hadn't bothered.

On the one hand I found myself disliking the author in a way I hadn't anticipated. This in itself is not a reason to dislike a book although in the case of an autobiography it doesn't help.

Clearly you should judge his character for yourself; his use (and abuse) of privilege, his dishonesty (not just in terms of thieving), his problems with bipolar disorder and his own achievements in TV and other areas are all things that are matters of personal opinion. All I will say is that this book has somewhat spoiled my enjoyment of his fantastic portrayal of the Jeeves character and that is a crime the author himself might understand. I do feel obliged to appreciate anyone who manages to make a half-decent mark in the world and so I'll get over it.

For the book itself, I found the writing variable. Sometimes there are glimpses of good prose and you kid yourself that this man is actually living up to the hype. However, the sum of the parts left me feeling that this is a hollow book written by a hollow man.

It seems to me that he justifies everything by clouding your mind with words. In between the descriptions of his amazingly well appointed schools are passionate apologies, heartfelt splurges of polemic and hints of mental eccentricity.

I think most of this is an act. He dismisses his own intelligence but then spends a lot of effort creating the impression that he is a victim of his own superlative brain and character. This is privileged man who uses words and quotations to create an aura of erudition around himself when on close inspection there is little to justify this view.

"Oh I am not so very bright and even if I were, I wouldn't care" said the dull boy to the judge. Sure.

Clearing away this cloud, I realised that I found his thoughts overblown and poorly presented. About a third of the way in I remembered that I had read "The Liar" and that it was, frankly, trash. Here, underneath the excessive verbiage and constant reference to his extensive literary knowledge, his own thoughts come through as a mishmash of gimcrack (his word) ideas, self-aggrandising and egotistical nonsense covered at appropriate times by the aforementioned passionate apologies.

Finally, it occurred to me that this book tells us a lot about our society. Surface over substance. We see Stephen Fry the genius say a few smart things on TV and ergo he is amazingly talented in the eyes of the people.

We don't look underneath; we tag, we label, we assume.(less)

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Jan 23, 2011 Briar Rose rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, humour, memoir

Reading this book was much like listening to an interesting but self-important guest at a dinner party, who buttonholes you at the hors d'oeuvres and talks to you all night on a wide range of subjects. It's funny and endearing when Fry actually tells stories from his childhood, but he frequently goes off on tangents, which mostly involve long opinionated rants about random subjects, which add nothing to the story. For someone who is such a navel-gazer, he also seems strangely to lack self-awaren...more

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Jul 24, 2008 Siria rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiography, queer-lit

Meandering, witty, defensive, wildly self-indulgent, honest, conceited and very entertaining, reading Moab is my Washpot is an experience which I must imagine is very akin to sitting down with Stephen Fry and having him talk with and/or at you for a couple of hours about any subject which comes into his head. Fry recounts the first twenty years of his life—his periods at various boarding schools; his struggles with his sexuality; his suicide attempt and his conviction for fraud—with a great deal...more

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Apr 08, 2008 Ruth rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book wasn't quite what I expected, although I'm not sure exactly what I did expect! It meanders a lot, almost like a Ronnie Corbett armchair sketch - one minute he's telling you about what happened on a certain day during his childhood, and then he starts wandering off, telling you all about his opinions on the subject matter of that day's school lesson, or the way certain people behave. I found it an enjoyable read, and I want to know "what happened next" - the book deals with the first 20...more

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Oct 06, 2012 Apryl Anderson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I adore Stephen Fry. I really wish he hadn't invited me into his apologetic--and I DON'T mean apology--for his sexuality, because I believe that intimacy isn't meant to be shouted from the rooftops.

Ah, but there's that great paradox that is Stephen Fry, and precisely why I adore him! He unabashedly exposes the eternal battles within oneself: the Minotaur, Icarus, Oedipus, all of Olympia, no doubt. Intimacy is all about trust, and if one doesn't know how to trust oneself...oh, what a troubled exi...more

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Aug 23, 2012 Jim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: comedy

A rambling account of Stephen Fry's turbulent schooldays, which sees him expelled three times and put in a young offender's institution before turning his life around and being awarded a scholarship to Queens' (!) College, Cambridge. We see him in this autobiography, at his washpot scrubbing away at "the grime of years". Here he candidly confesses to some shameful acts of kleptomania such as stealing the pension money of the grandmother of a party host. Stephen Fry is forever getting in trouble...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Na rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I loved reading every page of it…

I received this book as one of my Christmas present from my husband. He used to mention him to me now and again. I have caught my husband watching his BBC show QI a few times and when I watched one of OI series with him, I have quite became obsessed with the program. It is a show where Stephen Fry and 4 guests have a kind of quiz game. Stephen Fry is the quiz master in this program and they talk about some very interesting topics. This program clearly gives us an...more

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Jul 07, 2012 Emily rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Maybe it's just too British for me, and possibly a bit pleonastic, but most of this book just went right around my head. I wouldn't say over my head because I'm sure I have the capacity to understand what the devil "Cambridge Blue" means and how exactly the British school system is structured, but having very rarely come into contact with it before, I have to say it's just beyond me.
Fry's rambling memoir also devolves into long non-chronological rants upon such things as Authors he has Loved (m...more

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Apr 01, 2012 Heather rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

I love Stephen Fry. No matter what one may think of him (and I personally think he's brilliant), the man's command of the English language is wonderful, and he uses it to his full advantage in this memoir of his childhood years. The book is made up of a few large chapters detailing various periods in his early life (his move across schools, the realisation of his sexuality, his first love, his arrest/incarceration) and ends with his acceptance into Cambridge. This book reminded me an awful lot o...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Billy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stephen Fry is a once-in-a-generation intellectual talent that, thank god, dedicated his life to show business rather than government, business, or the academy. Perhaps owing to the TV show Bones (which I have not seen), you're maybe a little more likely to have heard of him in America than a few years ago; you probably have heard of his long-time comedic partner Hugh Laurie, now better known as Gregory House, MD. My first encounter with Stephen was unwitting on my part - turns out he had writte...more Stephen Fry is a once-in-a-generation intellectual talent that, thank god, dedicated his life to show business rather than government, business, or the academy. Perhaps owing to the TV show Bones (which I have not seen), you're maybe a little more likely to have heard of him in America than a few years ago; you probably have heard of his long-time comedic partner Hugh Laurie, now better known as Gregory House, MD. My first encounter with Stephen was unwitting on my part - turns out he had written the book for the updated 'Me and My Girl' that my high school put on as a musical my sophomore year, the jokes of which I found genuinely funny unlike the hee-haw corniness of the Rodgers and Hammerstein shows that were otherwise on the menu. My next encounter was sometime in the early aughts, when one of the Manhattan public television networks (or was it NJN?) for some reason replayed the British series Absolute Power, which I thought was wicked and wonderful, and then later came the genius of 'A Bit of Fry and Laurie' and of course Blackadder, followed more recently by his wholly-excusable-for-how-amusing-it-is turn as a game show host for the British panel quiz QI (short for "quite interesting", as you probably guessed). He and Hugh Laurie also played, respectively, Jeeves and Wooster, and Stephen was the titular Oscar in "Wilde." Oh yes, this is supposed to be a book review - Well, turns out Stephen had a semi-rebellious childhood and adolescence, with a penchant for stealing that ultimately earned him prison time; he is known for saying (not frivolously) that boarding school was the best preparation for prison as one could expect. This is a childhood memoir that covers that ground, as well as his recognition of his sexuality, educational development and career aspirations. It's quite an intimate, vulnerable undertaking at times (how many close friends even have you told the story of your very first, um, 'little death'?). Fry is a master and lover of the English language, and knows just when to be serious and when to suddenly interrupt his own flow with a playfully pointless tangent. I don't know if you'd enjoy it that much without some context of appreciating him as an actor/performer, so I'd say check him out in that arena first and if you find yourself charmed then come back here. (less)

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Dec 18, 2011 Dorothea rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I adore Stephen Fry and I enjoyed this book very much. It is of course funny, with some bits I laughed aloud at.

(I also laughed aloud at one of the blurbs on the back cover, which I'm not sure was funny on purpose: "The writing is rhapsodic, intoxicated, and very touching" -- Mail on Sunday, which might have meant to say "intoxicating"...)

I didn't know anything about Fry's childhood and adolescence before I picked up this book, which is about the first twenty years of his life. I didn't even kno...more I adore Stephen Fry and I enjoyed this book very much. It is of course funny, with some bits I laughed aloud at.

(I also laughed aloud at one of the blurbs on the back cover, which I'm not sure was funny on purpose: "The writing is rhapsodic, intoxicated, and very touching" -- Mail on Sunday, which might have meant to say "intoxicating"...)

I didn't know anything about Fry's childhood and adolescence before I picked up this book, which is about the first twenty years of his life. I didn't even know that he came from a wealthy family and went to prep and public schools. So I was surprised to read about his early habits of lying and stealing, which culminated in a spree of credit-card theft when he was 18, for which he was caught and given two years of probation.

I don't think I've ever previously read the autobiography of someone whose criminal activity was an important part of his or her life (although this will change as I want to read John Dean's Blind Ambition!), so it was very interesting to me how Fry described the lying and stealing part of his past self. He's very honest about how it made him feel good to do these things and how wrong he knew and knows that they were.

It seemed clear to me that some of this -- how he felt about his behavior, anyway, not the fact that he did it -- was related to his bipolar disorder (one of the few things I knew about his life before starting the autobiography), but he doesn't discuss this very much at all. Maybe that's because he wasn't diagnosed until much later. I expect he writes more about it in the second volume of his autobiography (strangely titled The Fry Chronicles instead of Over Edom Will I Cast Out My Shoe).

He writes about the end of his teens, from leaving his first public school to applying to be a prep school teacher, very briefly. This feels a bit strange because earlier in the book he had often referred to this period (e.g. "the next time I saw that place I would be running from the law"). I think this is partly because much of this period wasn't very clear to him while he was living it, and perhaps partly because it's painful to dwell on, but mostly that the earlier painful events he has described with far more detail and analysis have given the reader enough understanding of his character to fill in this period without need for more words.(less)

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Oct 30, 2011 John Grinstead rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The first instalment of the Stephen Fry autobiography provides a graphic, if not wholly unsurprising insight into the man (enigma?) who some regard as the People's Polyglot - clearly highly intelligent, with an incisive wit and with an extraordinary vocabulary who is able to effortlessly appeal across class and all ages from the highly accessible offerings of Blackadder and his partnership with Hugh Laurie to the more highbrow quiz shows and travelogs. 'Moab' recounts Fry's early days of prep sc...more

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Oct 23, 2011 P J rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

We all know what a clever-clogs Fry is, and I approached this with some caution. In any case, I’m not generally fond of autobiographical work and would not have read this if someone had not handed it to me. Sure enough I spent a lot of the time irritated by him, an irritation not lessened by his description of his defloration by a prefect at Uppingham, which seemed to me insufferably (mmm … that’s almost a Fryism) smugly self-effacing..
But the trouble is that Fry is a very clever man, He is witt...more We all know what a clever-clogs Fry is, and I approached this with some caution. In any case, I’m not generally fond of autobiographical work and would not have read this if someone had not handed it to me. Sure enough I spent a lot of the time irritated by him, an irritation not lessened by his description of his defloration by a prefect at Uppingham, which seemed to me insufferably (mmm … that’s almost a Fryism) smugly self-effacing..
But the trouble is that Fry is a very clever man, He is witty and complex, and well, nice. Asked to leave Uppingham he was sent to the Paston School in North Walsham, a day school - ‘Paston School lived up to all my prejudices, as things always will to the prejudiced’. Ah, yes, I though. As his adventures continued I warmed to him, and his tale, considerably.
I certainly identified with his problems with schools, and I was delighted to learn that we were both remanded in custody in the same detention centre, although my offences were embarringly humdrum in comparison with young Fry’s spree with the stolen credit card (and committed many years earlier).
I’m not particularly stupid: standard measurements consistently place mine (or used to) in the top one per cent of British IQs. But generally though, one of the impressions that I inevitably draw from Moab is my Washtub is that Fry is a lot cleverer than I am – what does the title mean? I cannot entirely put this down to his advantage in being Jewish and homosexual, although it must be pretty much established that particularity commonly inspires outstanding performance. No, Stephen is bloody bright.
Incidentally he makes a nice point about Jewishness. To us goyim, a surname tends to suggest Jewish – Goldstein, Finkler etc. So the offspring of a gentile father and a Jewish mother is seen as Jewish. To Jews, Jewishness is passed through the mother, so Stephen, with a Jewish mother, was Jewish to Jews and not to gentiles. Weird eh? Or is this the sort of play that he is just too fond of – nit-picking and pointless? The sort of that a clever, kindly, but irritating uncle says to baffle us children, while we hope that what he is saying, if we can only work it out, is more interesting than it in fact is.
Well, hell. Yes I had had some reservations. But this is the story of the formative years of a national treasure. One who disarms you with the self-denial of his own intellect, ‘Mathew was no exception to the general view of me. He looked up to me, physically because I was a foot taller, and intellectually because he sincerely believed that I had access to wisdom and knowledge which were denied him.’ Mmm… But it is witty, and chatty and learned and fun. A great read.
And who is so sad, so lacking in their experience of new starts that they have not at some time in their lives felt as Stephen does in the final paragraphs of the book when he sums up himself, part philosopher, part Mr Toad: -
‘Was I exuberant? …..
Go and sin no more? I’m sorry, Mr Cromie, but there are sins out there I haven’t even heard of yet – not even me: clever-clogs, smart-arse, read-it-all, know-it-all, done-it-all me.
You bet I was fucking exuberant.’

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Aug 04, 2011 Jesse Young rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Listening to the audio-book edition, as I did on my Kindle, I experienced the added pleasure of hearing Stephen Fry's stellar narration. Covering the first 20 years of this polymath of a British cultural icon's (or more self-deprecating, as Fry would have it 'know-it-all' or 'smart-ass') life; Moab Is My Washpot is eminently entertaining throughout. The appeal of the book reveals itself in the afterword; with Fry pointing out that his journey into adulthood was both at once unremarkable and bizz...more

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Jul 26, 2011 Jenny Sparrow rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"Моав - умывальная чаша моя" - это автобиография, в которой описываются первые 20 лет жизни человека-феномена Стивена Фрая. Тут собраны не только замечательные, красочные описания быта английского поместья середины 20 века, жизни в закрытых школах и даже местах не столь отдаленных, но и многочисленные размышления автора на темы музыки, писательства, образования, комедии, культуры, гомосексуализма и прочих материй, с которыми автор сталкивался в жизни.

К сожалению, я читала не в оригинале, но даже...more "Моав - умывальная чаша моя" - это автобиография, в которой описываются первые 20 лет жизни человека-феномена Стивена Фрая. Тут собраны не только замечательные, красочные описания быта английского поместья середины 20 века, жизни в закрытых школах и даже местах не столь отдаленных, но и многочисленные размышления автора на темы музыки, писательства, образования, комедии, культуры, гомосексуализма и прочих материй, с которыми автор сталкивался в жизни.

К сожалению, я читала не в оригинале, но даже на переводе видно, как богат, многослоен, уникален язык Фрая. Книга чиатется быстро, легко (хотя некоторые отвлеченные лирические отступления требуют концентрации мозга :) ), приятно. Фрай словно ведет с вами диалог, постепенно разворачивая картину своей бурной молодости и вплетая в узор повествования лирические, порой многостраничные, отступления. Но неизменно возвращается к начатой теме, что создает атмосферу длинного откровенного разговора. Прочитав автобиографию этого человека, я с удивлением заметила, что стала считать его своим очень хорошим знакомым - столькими интимными мыслями и подробностями делится он со своими читателями.

Я никогда прежде не читала автобиографий, и тем более таких захватывающих. Советую книгу и тем, кто уже успел подпасть под обаяние "национальной гордости Британии", и тем, кто о нем слышал только смутно. Удовольствие гарантировано :)(less)

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Nov 30, 2010 Helen (Helena/Nell) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fry has so much charisma, even on the page, that one preserves a certain reticence. He oozes charm, and therefore the natural response is to turn put an anti-charm cloak. Even so, he got me.

For a start, he's so intensely readable, so easy to read that there's pleasure just in that. And then for me -- well he's my decade, a couple of years younger than me -- and so many of his references were my references, his life is my life.

I even know a bit about the sort of background he thrived in, the who...more Fry has so much charisma, even on the page, that one preserves a certain reticence. He oozes charm, and therefore the natural response is to turn put an anti-charm cloak. Even so, he got me.

For a start, he's so intensely readable, so easy to read that there's pleasure just in that. And then for me -- well he's my decade, a couple of years younger than me -- and so many of his references were my references, his life is my life.

I even know a bit about the sort of background he thrived in, the whole public school thing, because although I didn't go to one, I did grow up in a private primary school that prepared wee boys for the Common Entrance exam. Later I even tutored one or two myself.

I like the way he stops and examines things minutely -- like the whole corporal punishment thing, for example. His argument is really interesting, the idea that when a thing is 'normal' -- i.e. everybody is doing it, it can be less damaging somehow. And he's good on sex, really. And he's enormously clever at creating the sense that he's actually conducting a conversation with you, and with himself, and that he's worrying away at stuff until he works it through. Sometimes you even get the sense that you just SAID something to which he's obviously replying.

I wouldn't want to be Stephen Fry. Not ever. He couldn't help being a scene stealer throughout his childhood, and he's still doing it. His public persona is who he is. The honesty about his own impulse to steal -- that thing which must have been a product of acute unhappiness -- even that becomes a disclosure which is part of the personal drama. It must be so difficult to take off your clothes in public. And then so difficult, if you're Stephen Fry, not to.

He talks about how much he still hates not being able to sing, because it means not being able to join in. That took me back to a lovely little film -- Peter's Friends -- in which Fry plays the central role. My favourite scene, which moves me to tears even to think about it, is the bit where the entire cast assembles round the piano and sings. And Imelda Staunton turns out to have such a beautiful voice -- and the whole point of the scene, as I remember it, is the way the singing lifts him, the way Peter's friends are a kind of glory of which he is a part, though he isn't partnered. It's almost a rejoinder to the bits in this book about not being able to join in.

I must send for that film on DVD and watch it again.(less)

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Apr 29, 2010 AdultNonFiction Teton County Library rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, humor

TCL Call #: BIO Fry

Madeleine - 4 stars
I picked up this book after watching Craig Furgeson host the Late Late show. He changed his format when he had Stephen Fry on - dedicating the entire hour to him and having no studio audience. The end result was a rapid fire, quick-witted and simultaneously funny and intellegent discussion that gamboled all over the place.
This autobiography has the same qualities. Fry is more famous in England where he is known for his acting and his time with Blackadder. Bu...more

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Mar 19, 2010 Madeleine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fictions-ok

TCL Call #: BIO Fry

I picked up this book after watching Craig Furgeson host the Late Late show. He changed his format when he had Stephen Fry on - dedicating the entire hour to him and having no studio audience. The end result was a rapid fire, quick-witted and simultaneously funny and intellegent discussion that gamboled all over the place.
This autobiography has the same qualities. Fry is more famous in England where he is known for his acting and his time with Blackadder. But he actually grew...more

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Feb 27, 2010 Raj rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, autobiography

I wondered for a lot of this book why it seemed so familiar before it dawned on me: it looks like Fry plundered large parts of his own life for his novel The Liar. In fact, he did it so well, you almost wonder why he bothered with this autobiography. Although it's as well written and full of the wonder of language as you would expect from Fry, much of it comes across as pretentious and somewhat self-pitying, or rather, pitying his younger self, since this book covers the first 20 or so years of...more

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Mar 03, 2011 Debbie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography

This book with the wonderfully obscure title is Stephen Fry's account of the early years in his life, from childhood until just before he entered Cambridge University.

I will confess that I am a huge fan of Stephen Fry, but not the type of fan to go stalking their prey on the internet, so I knew virtually nothing about his life outside of TV shows and books. This book then was a revelation in many ways. What a tempestuous youth he lived through - I can imagine an army of psychologists just itchin...more

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Feb 23, 2011 wrench rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So I really liked this book.
Um, I think it's definitely worth reading especially if you're a fan of Stephen Fry.
A few problematic things I'd like to flag, just off the top of my head because I don't have the book anymore (damn library always wanting its books back), but anyway.

So the main thing I can think of (and will probably add more later)is the way he talks about accessibility to queer literature.
I don't know the exact line, but he says something like nowadays young queers have all sorts of...more

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Dec 21, 2010 Greg added it · review of another edition

Shelves: autobiographies

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 04, 2007 Maria rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: GLBT, Stephen Fry fans, people who aren't Stephen Fry fans yet, ex-convicts, and everyone else

Shelves: nonfiction, glbt

This is definitely a book I'd take to a desert island. Stephen Fry's writing about his pre-university life is touching, funny, sad, and indescribably brilliant. It's also a fascinating glimpse into English public school life in the late 1950-early 1960s. I think my favourite parts, though, are his little asides on music, literature, and history. The bit about his relationship with music is, to me, some of the most memorable writing I've had the pleasure of knowing.

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Mar 06, 2012 Amrita rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

There aren't enough words in the world, including all languages known and unknown, alive and dead, ancient and modern, fetal and aged, sensible and non-sensible, and known to stephen fry and not known to stephen fry that could dare to, even adequately, describe him. What makes this man so impossibly endearing? We all know the wordy, well-read and all around knowledgeable "geniuses" at school. We know those who come from middle-class, but more importantly, bourgeois well-educated families. I know...more

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Jan 30, 2012 Kirsten rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Tiddly tiddly um-pum-pum, bum. Bum, poo and rudies. This autobiography of the first twenty years of Stephen Fry's life is crammed full of boarding school, teachers, the awakening buds of first homosexual frottage, and the screamingly frustrating boundaries imposed on a young, freakishly intelligent aesthete 'à fleur de peau'. However, given that this is an autobiography rather than a piece of fiction, Fry had little choice (although this does beg the question as to why then his fiction is often...more

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Oct 31, 2011 Sofia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

Posted on my book blog.

I am ambivalent about this book. On one hand it is an extremely well-written account of Mr. Fry's early life and old-style English education, that manages to be both extremely funny and tragic in its sincerity. On the other hand, the author goes off on tangents a lot, and his love for words meant that his writing was either beautiful and poignant or rather painful to read.

Still, I don't think I've ever seen such an honest and spot-on account of what it feels like to be a c...more

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About Stephen Fry

Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, writer, actor, humourist, novelist, poet, columnist, filmmaker, television personality and technophile. As one half of the Fry and Laurie double act with his comedy partner, Hugh Laurie, he has appeared in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. He is also famous for his roles in Blackadder and Wilde, and as the host of QI. In addition to writing fo...more

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“It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — 453 people liked it

“Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why, why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world, I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me.” — 299 people liked it

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