Product Description

Anne Robinson's mother was a cross between Robert Maxwell and Mother Teresa. When she became a young reporter in Fleet Street, her mother, a wealthy market trader, bought her a mink coat and told her to have a facial once a month. But Robinson's early success almost ended in her destruction. A doomed marriage was followed by a secret custody battle for her two-year-old daughter, Emma. "Is it true," her husband's barrister demanded in court, "you once said you'd rather cover the Vietnam War than vacuum the sitting room?" This is a shocking, funny poignant, honest account of three generations of women - Anne's formidable mother; Anne; and her daughter Emma - plus Anne's downfall, including the shame of the years after the custody battle, her alcoholism and the triumph of returning to take a second go at life and making it work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #492854 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-13
• Released on: 2002-06-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Anne Robinson's most recent public persona--the hardened battleaxe of television's The Weakest Link--is but a very small part of this quizmistress; Memoirs Of An Unfit Mother will most likely change your perceptions of the star. This book is a good read, but not a comfortable one. It's interesting: a saga-style across-the-generations tale of the Robinson clan. Of course, as a long-standing journalist before she hit the TV big time, Robinson's written style ensures the pages turn quickly. Memoirs of An Unfit Mother reads like a deposition for the defence of Anne Robinson, by Anne Robinson. It's hard to tell how many prospective readers know much of her life before the consumer TV programme Watchdog, so the author's decision to lay down hard facts about her alcoholism, the demise of a troubled marriage, blind ambition and the subsequent loss of custodial rights to her daughter Emma is risky.

Certainly, there have been hard lessons learnt. Which reader cannot sympathise with the empty dread a mother must feel when a child is taken away? The desperate loneliness? The horror of being judged as a failed parent? Sad things have certainly happened. But Robinson¹s reasoning--that the same would not happen to a hard-drinking workaholic man--only half helps her case for public support. It is difficult to empathise with someone who equates herself with Margaret Thatcher at every turn since the 1970s. Someone who recognises greed as a good point. And someone who seems to take great pride in telling how her husband was derided by colleagues when she became his boss. Readers who remember "Auntie Annie" from Watchdog may be shocked by her--perhaps self-protectively--hardened heart. Those who believe the hype for TV's Mrs Nasty are also mistaken--there aren't many intended wrongs here. Instead, Anne Robinson has laid herself bare, in an appeal to public opinion that she's been wronged by the system. Maybe she has. All in all, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother is worth reading, and worth learning from. It's all down here in black and white, but it is the grey areas in between which hold the intrigue. --Helen Lamont

Review
The remarkable life story of the Fleet Street journalist and famous Watchdog and The Weakest Link TV personality that takes in Anne Robinson's doomed marriage; a vicious custody battle for her daughter; and her descent and fight back from alcoholism.

Anne Robinson is probably best known as the resident dominatrix of television game show The Weakest Link. Her long, difficult and relatively distinguished career as a journalist takes second place to an assumed persona that hides a history of failed relationships, personal pain and loss - and an addiction to alcohol that almost killed her. Growing up a good Catholic girl with a charismatic but domineering mother, Robinson's early career success as a reporter left her unprepared for any kind of failure. A desperately unsuccessful first marriage left her ripe for conversion to hopeless drunk and lost her custody of her two-year-old daughter, Emma. In these days before feminism, the courts seem more concerned about Robinson's career ambition than about her drinking, her solicitor tries to bed her and Emma's care is eventually entrusted to her equally ambitious journalist father. The most affecting part of the book concerns her struggle to drag herself out of addiction, though there is much more to the book than an inspirational real-life tale. Its scope stretches across three generations, from the life of her outrageous powerhouse of a mother, through Robinson's own chequered history, to the blossoming movie industry career of grown-up Emma. It also has much to say on the women's issues that touched upon this lifelong journalist's career - from the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher to the unhappy marriage and eventual death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Stylistically, the book reads like a newspaper column. Tightly written - sometimes too tightly - its slick journalese is an odd vehicle for confessions of pain and vulnerability and can make the reader feel manipulated into a preordained response. Nevertheless, it's both an absorbing read and an intriguing slice of 20th-century social history. (Kirkus UK)

Customer Reviews

Painfully honest
I have rarely read an autobiography which is as honest in its content as this. Notwithstanding the media hype, Anne Robinson's intellect and her sheer guts shine through. Her account of her alcoholism is so devoid of self-pity and so painfully accurate that it almost physically hurts to read it. I left the book feeling grateful and privileged to have had an insight into the personality of someone who in no way is, or ever was, an unfit mother. The book also gives a brilliant insight into the hypocrisy and sexism which pervaded British society in the 60s and70s. I highly recommend this book.

unfit mother or unfortunate mother
brilliant read from start to finish. Looking at her on the Weakest Link you wouldn't think she had been through so much. It does show though that you have to get up a get on with it, when you are knocked down again and again. I have nothing but admiration for her after reading this book.

Honesty and courage
It takes a specially courageous person to admit to weaknesses; few have examined past weaknesses with the sort of honesty Anne Robinson shows in this book. Her battle against alcohol addiction gives an ungilded account of her powerlessness in the face of vodka and her final strength in rescuing herself from her self-made black hole. But also her fight against prevalent attitudes to women at the time she was taking her first steps in journalism shows how determination can overcome social prejudice. Her book does not reveal her as perfect; it reveals her as talented, strong but vulnerable, decisive yet indecisive, and above all honest. Anybody whose perception of Robinson is based on the dominatrix she plays in The Weakest Link may be in for a shock. Utterly compelling and utterly honest.