Auto Da Fay

By Fay Weldon

Book Overview

Fay Weldon, one of England's best-selling and most celebrated authors, looks back on her life as wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, and bon vivant in this funny and engaging memoir. She writes brilliantly about her upbringing in New Zealand, as young and poor girl in London, as an unmarried mother, wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, and winer-and-diner: there is little ground she's failed to cover.
Brought up among women-her intrepid mother, grandmother, and sister-Weldon found men a mystery until the swinging-sixties London introduced her to the indecent, the hopeless, and the golden-footed. A central figure among the Bohemian writers and artists of the sixties, she has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.
Born Franklin Birkinshaw in Barnt Green, Birmingham, in 1931, most of Weldon's childhood was spent in New Zealand. Her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, played only a minor role as was generally absent. Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. 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 from New Zealand, just after the Second World War, her mother kept the brood together by working as a servant in a grand house-the experience of living below stairs later helped Weldon to script the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs.
After graduating from St. Andrews University, Weldon worked in the Foreign Office until becoming pregnant. Defying the conventions of the times, she remained a single parent. She struggled, living in poverty in post-war London made all the more grinding since she was trying to maintain respectability. Following a stint at the Daily Mirror, she drifted into advertising before desperately entering into a crushingly awful marriage of financial (in)convenience-a marriage so dreadful she writes of it in the third person as if writing about characters in a novel. With cool, unwavering honesty she details the truly crushing experience of being hitched to a celibate, Masonic headmaster who encouraged her to work in a seedy West End nightclub. She escapes eventually, and finds true love at thirty after meeting Ron Weldon at a party. When this union, too, comes to an end, Fay's packed enough experience into her life to begin her career as a writer. She develops into a bohemian intellectual, and works alongside poets such as Edwin Brock, David Wevill and Peter Porter, pens winning advertising slogans, and truly begins writing seriously. Fay closes her riveting memoir as she drops what will be her first success, a television play, into a Regents Park mailbox on her way to the hospital to give birth. The play will be the first of many triumphs for a writer whose provocative oeuvre has never failed to excite, madden, or interest.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802141420
• ISBN13: 9780802141422
• Release Date: May 2004
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 366 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Sheer delight

Auto Da Fay is about as good as autobiography gets. Fay Weldon has a wonderful zest for life and a larger than life-size personality that comes through on every page. It's the sort of book that cheers you up and restores your faith in human nature. A Good Boy Tomorrow: Memoirs of A Fundamentalist Upbringing Basic Flying Instruction: A Comprehensive Introduction to Western Philosophy

An Utterly Delightful Autobiography

Fay Weldon is the author of twenty-four novels, five short story collections, two children's books, four works of nonfiction, several plays, and now AUTO DA FAY, a memoir. This delightful autobiography is imbued with the same audaciousness and perspicacity as is her other works. As a woman of deep insights she highlights the key, transcendent events of her life. On page one, titled "Pre-name", she writes, "I long for a day of judgment when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear. We take to fiction ... because no such thing is going to happen, and at least on the printed page we can observe beginnings, middles and ends, and can find out where morality resides." She declares that, while life moves into entropy, each individual does the best with the hand s/he is dealt.Weldon was born in 1931 and raised in a rural New Zealand town called Napier. She was the daughter of a troubled but creative mother who, along with Fay and her sister Jane, was abandoned by Fay's father, a selfish, philandering doctor named Frank Birkinshaw. The girls attended a private parochial school and, early on, Fay displayed her dislike for authority and disdain for pomposity. "Mother Teresa was nice and motherly, and would hug you and give you sticky treats: all the others ... ruled by sarcasm and violence. I liked their names, but that was about all."When the sisters wanted to baptize the girls, Fay's mother wouldn't allow it. She describes her parents as "... freethinkers, rationalists - humanists" and, while Jane had been christened as a Protestant, Fay had not even had that benediction to her name. This state of her soul meant that Fay was excluded from much at school and learned to enjoy her own company. She also had to learn to take care of herself and approach life's challenges with a sense of humor. She says she was the 'good' girl, always wanting to please.Affable or not, Fay grew up in a strange milieu that was often as perplexing as it was pleasing. She attended school, made friends, and her relationship with her troubled mother was as exasperating as any normal girl finds her mother to be, even under the best of circumstances --- and these women certainly didn't have it easy. In 1946, at the end of World War II, upon the death of a relative, Fay's mother received an inheritance of ... "nine hundred pounds." This gift changed all of their lives because it allowed them to go to England. There, the schools Fay attended and the people she met offered the opportunity for her to nurture her genius for writing.Weldon's life, at times, unfolds like the lives her heroines lead: she became pregnant and gave birth to a son; she married a man whom she thought would take care of her, but didn't want to have sex with her and insisted he be her pimp; she went to work for an ad agency and did so well that she wrote herself out of a job; and twists of fate kept her on a journey into an interesting life that