Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #252246 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-02
• Released on: 2007-11-05
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio Cassette
• 8 pages

Synopsis
A humorous autobiography that covers the author's time at public school, acting and writing career and the ups and downs of his personal life.

Customer Reviews

MOAB CLEANS UP!
Stephen Fry`s autobiography is astonishingly frank, very funny and tremendously touching by turns - his life of crime is treated with a frankness which seeks no sympathy and the torments of adolescense leave no stone unturned. Throughout we feel that Stephen is talking to us as the sort of erudite yet unselfconscious companion one would love to spend time with of an evening in a firelit country pub. I hope it won`t be too much longer before the sequel comes out!

Mick Drake author of the comic novel All`s Well at Wellwithoute

A truly great autobiography
I read The Liar and The Hippopotamus and found them a little too flowery for my liking, but then I'm not a great novel reader anyway. The pages of this book, on the other hand, turned so quickly, I thought they might catch fire.

As another reviewer stated, his frequent ramblings off the main thread of the story are sheer joy and make you feel he is in the room talking to you. And he can't resist teaching us a new word by including it then demonstrating its meaning e.g. rhotacism, or explicitly correcting a widely used grammatical or spelling error! All very familiar Fry stuff.

Stephen says himself that his life is at once as unremarkable as they come and stranger than fiction, when you put it down at the end, you feel he is spot on. Only once towards the very end did I see a quality in him that you could be unashamedly proud of.

Don't worry if you don't like his novels, this is one of the most absorbing and satisfying autobiographies ever written.

'A little to much information', as they say.
I have always been something of a fan of Stephen Fry and this was the first, but not the last, of his books that I was to read. The phrase that comes to mind is 'to much information'. Although he has clearly had an interesting life, I'm not sure it was in his, or my, best interests for him to write it all down. I imagine it was something of a therapy for him, which if I remember resulted in him disappearing for some time. Quite understandable. I'm no prude, but parts of this book where reminiscent of the potting shed scene in the film 'Scum'. Contrary to other reviews I didn't find too much to laugh at in the book and felt it lacked the qualities of Stephen Fry I find so appealing. I have read several of his other books, which I more than enjoyed and thought where very well written. I would recommend these books, but unfortunately not this one.