Product Description

The one and only Fay Weldon tells the story of her turbulent and controversial life. From the 1930s to the 2000s, Fay Weldon has seen and lived our times. As a child in New Zealand, young and poor in London, unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, spag-bol-cook, winer-and-diner, there are few waterfronts that she hasn't covered, few battles she hasn't fought. An icon to many, a thorn-in-the-flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. Her life and times cover love, sex, babies, blokes, poverty, work, politics, and not a few Very Famous Names. Moving from New Zealand to London to Scotland, from the UK to points east and west, Weldon has sipped, gulped, and sometimes spat out the things that make us what we are today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #185166 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 366 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Auto Da Fay is the scriptwriter, novelist, journalist and pioneering feminist Fay Weldon's candid and enjoyably digressive autobiography. Concluding at the beginning of the 1960s with the birth of her second son and the production of her very first television play, it's primarily an account of her (often arduous) formative years. (Those in search of revelations about her time at the heart of the women's movement will, for the moment at least, have to rely on Big Women, her fictional account of that period.)

Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor, if biologically necessary, role in her existence. She was raised, along with her older sister Jane, by her formidable mother and her bohemian grandmother, a woman once on intimate terms with HG Wells, Rebecca West and Edith Nesbitt. (Weldon's family, it turns out, has an impressive literary pedigree; her grandfather, Edgar, uncle Selwyn and, for a brief while, her mother were all novelists.) Arriving in London just after the Second World War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant; the experience of living below stairs later helped Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs. After St Andrews University, Weldon worked in the Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying conventions of the times, she remained a single parent. Following a stint as a consumer agony aunt for the Daily Mirror she drifted into advertising before in utter desperation entering into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience. With cool, unwavering honesty she details, in the third person, the truly depressing experience of being hitched to a celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy West End night-club. She escaped, found true love and, working alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David Wevill and Peter Porter, went on to pen such winning advertising slogans as "Go to Work on An Egg" and "Unzip a Banana" and began writing seriously. Riddled with Weldon's customary wayward and even mildly contradictory opinions, this frank, acerbic and witty memoir can be infuriating on occasions but is certainly never dull.--Travis Elborough

Review
'Wonderfully fluent and entertaining!studded with her trademark gems of crisp observations!you can't put this terrific book down. You can always trust Fay to be provocative -- and this time she excels herself.' Daily Mail 'Engrossing and entertaining. This is the sort of book stuffed full of things that you hope are made up but fear are true.' Observer 'One of the most prolific, entertaining and provocative of contemporary women writers has sought to make retrospective sense of the muddle and unexpectedness of life. Like her novels, the surface sparkles along merrily enough but there are darker currents beneath.' Sunday Telegraph 'It is an astonishing story lightly and deftly told. It will delight Weldon's many fans. Gripping.' Daily Telegraph 'The rich, fruity haphazardness of her experience will startle and amaze!as they say, you couldn't make it up.' Sunday Times 'Hilarious!entertaining!compelling!"Auto da Fay" is just like its author: big, blousy and sometimes hard to believe. In the end, though, they both demand our respect.' Independent on Sunday 'Fay Weldon's voice is as unmistakeable as her acerbic wit.' Financial Times 'Fay Weldon writes as if she were Virginia Woolf and Roseanne Arnold joined at the hip. She is literary, well-read, totally in control, sharp as a needle and off the wall!' Mirabella 'Weldon, like Dickens, can have her readers perched on the edge of their chairs with excitement by the end of the first page and hold them there in a state of riveted curiosity until the last words.' The Standard 'Weldon is a gifted tease of a writer.' Sunday Times 'Prolific and provocative, Fay Weldon shines brightest in the league table of British women novelists.' Time Out

About the Author
Fay Weldon is a novelist, screenwriter and cultural journalist. Her novels include 'The Life and Loves of a She-Devil', 'Puffball', 'Big Women' and 'Rhode Island Blues'. Her most recent novel was the critically acclaimed 'She May Not Leave'. She lives in Dorset.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating lady!
Fay Weldon begins her autobiography with her birth,in Birmingham, England.She guides us through to her emmigration to New Zealand at a young age.This is an interesting episode because her family's migration was done the old way,via sea voyage.
She reveals her medical doctor father was, unfortunately,something of a dissapointment,being unreliable at inconvenient times,and by and large,not being there for his daughters.Fay being the younger of two daughters.Later on we learn that the son her father had with his second wife, grew up to be some big cheese in soft porn movies.It seems so many of her relatives and associates are notable for something or other. Her upbringing was largly female orientated. Her mother strikes as being somewhat stoic and conservative.There is a heart rending account of the young Fay's immature fascination with an older girl at school being misinterpreted as lesbianism by her disappoving mother.
The family( minus the father) moved back to the U.K when Fay was in her teens.
The many life changes and interesting associations this lady mentions in her autobiography are too numerous to mention.
Anybody who has devoured a Weldon novel, and wondered where her fascinating characters and insights come from ( Praxis & The Life & Loves Of A She-Devil for example)will gain a whole lot of insight from reading her autobiography.
Eventually, the book ends in the 1960's by which time, Fay Weldon was in her thirties.However, dont assume that this makes her autobiography hollow or sketchy,it ends at an appropriate point.

Being admirably candid,in the middle of the book,she relates the circumstances which led her to marrying an older gentleman, who, to her frustration, lacked any sexual interest in her whatsoever.She tells us how this unsuitable union led her to lose the plot somewhat, and how she temporarily descended into an unhealthy lifestyle of apathy and promiscuity- from which she proudly rescued herself, of course!She opted to write about herself in this chapter of her life, in third person.This demonstrating how far she has moved on since that dark period.
There is so much in this book.She has lived in haunted houses,seen loved ones tormented by mental illness, slept with her friends boyfriend,lost dear friends in nasty accidents,been a single mum with no money,and created many well known advertising slogans.However she does not give her writing career very much attention in this book.
The end is positive.You'll watch her emerge, very natrually, into a successful career woman,married to her true love,and finally into the accomplished author we know today.