Product Description

"Barry, you used to be so nice", Louisa Humphries frequently said to her son. Now, in his maturity, the Australian comedian reflects on his long journey away from niceness. Described by Barry as a "cubist self-portrait", "My Life As Me" revisits his childhood, his love-hate relationship with Australia and his adventures of the heart and stage. He tells us of his privileged youth in suburban Melbourne and describes his hectic artistic and romantic career in Australia, England and America. He also shares behind-the-scenes details of his life as creator and personal manager of Les Patterson, Sandy Stone and Dame Edna Everage.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380045 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 2
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

About the Author
Barry Humphries, sometimes known as Dame Edna Everage, is the author of several autobiographies, and plays. MORE PLEASE, his first autobiographical foray, won the JR Ackerley prize in 1993 and unparalleled praise. He is married to Lizzie Spender, the daughter of British poet Sir Stephen Spender, and has two sons and two daughters.

Customer Reviews

The one who throws the gladioli.
Who is it who alleges that she is the one who advises the wife of the President of the USA on how to help her husband finish his sentences? Who is it who actually, within Buckingham Palace, recently welcomed to a worldwide audience of millions its incumbent for the past fifty years, Queen Elizabeth the Second, as "the Birthday Girl"? If you know that this famous megastar is Dame Edna Everage, you will welcome the news that Edna's creator, Barry Humphries, has recently produced a memoir. An earlier memoir, entitled "More Please" won prizes and general admiration in 1993. This one, entitled "My Life As Me", is in the word of the author "a parallel memoir". I also found parallels when I looked at the dust jacket cover. Barry Humphries looks remarkably like Dame Edna Everage who is looking over his shoulder.

As one who has frequently laughed endlessly at the jokes, squirmed at the effrontery and been staggered by the satire at one or other of his live shows, I should warn readers that they might experience a degree of discomfort while reading this memoir. The candor is sometimes more than daring. The author's failures are freely acknowledged and sometimes analyzed mercilessly. Unlike Dame Edna, however, he is surprisingly generous and charitable in his comments about other people.

Behind all the facades is someone everyone can recognize, someone with a life-long concern about how he was perceived and treated by his parents and someone with an on-going concern about his own sons and daughters.

Everything uttered and written by Barry Humphries is worth attention.

From stiffled suburbanite to surrealist superstar
Barry Humphries here combines his artists eye for telling detail with a gift for fastidiously witty prose to produce a book of memoirs several cuts above average. Many themes from his earlier autobiographical volume 'More Please' are revisited, particularly the stiffling suburban Melbourne of his boyhood and the heady decade of boozy theatrical adventures in the London of the 1960s. What makes Humphries so much more interesting than his fellow comedians is the contradiction between his private personality - he is an obsessive collector and wilfully obscurantist extoller of fin de siecle art and literature - and his public performances. From his Dada days to the Dame Edna shows of the present, there is always a whiff of sulphur about the work of Barry Humphries, as if he were somehow visiting vengence on the world in which he grew up. With its wealth of deftly told anecdotes, pithy pen portraits and faint undertow of melancholy, this is a book I would recommend to anyone with even a passing interest in Humphries or his work.

Gently, funny, fascinating.
A gentle memoir of this hugely intelligent star, whom most people will recognise as Dame Edna or maybe the more grotesque Sir Les Patterson! But if you don't know his other work, then you will find this book even more eye-opening.

Fascinating, eloquant and recommended.