Basil Street Blues: A Memoir - Softcover

Holroyd, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393321746 ISBN 13: 9780393321746

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"A wonderful offbeat memoir.... Holroyd has written perhaps his best book yet."―Ben Macintyre, New York Times Book Review

Renowned biographer Michael Holroyd had always assumed that his own family was perfectly English, or at least perfectly ordinary. But an investigation into the Holroyd past―guided by old photograph albums, crumbling documents, and his parents' wildly divergent accounts of their lives―gradually yields clues to a constellation of startling events and eccentric characters: a slow decline from English nobility on one side, a dramatic Scandinavian ancestry on the other. Fires, suicides, bankruptcies, divorces, unconsummated longings, and the rumor of an Indian tea fortune permeate this wry, candid memoir, "part multiple biography, part autobiography, but principally an oblique investigation of the biographer's art" (New York Times Book Review). "[A] perfect example of a memoir that entrances me."―Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe "[O]ne of the few [biographers] who can convey what makes ordinary as well as extraordinary mortals live in our minds."―Los Angeles Times 16 pages of photographs

About this title

Review:

The distinguished biographer of Lytton Strachey and Bernard Shaw turns his trained eye on his kin in a thoughtful work that is as much a meditation on the nature of biography as a family memoir. Basil Street Blues has its origins in recollections Michael Holroyd asked his parents to write in the late 1970s, long after their 12-year marriage had ended. They agreed about little, not even the date of their son's birth in 1935, and Holroyd probes these discrepancies with the same brisk lucidity he has brought to subjects less intimately connected to his own life. Readers accustomed to the woe-is-me authorial stance frequently assumed in currently fashionable memoirs of familial dysfunction will be surprised by the impartial sympathy and considerable humor with which Holroyd depicts the financial, social, and sexual missteps of his parents, grandparents, and other relatives. Perhaps it's Anglo-Saxon stoicism inherited from his British father, perhaps the Scandinavian fatalism of his Swedish mother, but Holroyd has an impressive ability to view even his own youthful unhappiness with calm detachment. His elegantly written chronicle of "secret episodes and half-suspected dramas" nicely achieves its declared purpose: "to pare back a little the cuticle of time and to apply the research methods I have learnt as a biographer to my own life." --Wendy Smith

About the Author:

Michael Holroyd has written celebrated biographies of Hugh Kingsmill, Augustus John, and Bernard Shaw, as well as the acclaimed Basil Street Blues and Mosaic. He lives in London with his wife.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393321746
• ISBN 13: 9780393321746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 306