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A review by pghbekka
Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter by Diana Athill
5.0
If you love memoirs and have not read Diana Athill, I highly recommend all of her work.
Born in Norfolk, England in 1917, she worked during the war at BBC Overseas Service in the News Information Department. After the war she worked as an editor, first at Allan Wingate and then at André Deutsch, until her retirement at the age of 75 in 1993. As an editor, she worked with authors such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer. In between, she has traveled the world and lived and loved and beautifully set her feelings and observations about life on paper.
She didn't write her memoirs chronologically, and you don't have to read them chronologically (though you mostly could). The first of her books I reads was Somewhere Towards the End, her musings on life as she entered her 90's, and this book, Alive, Alive, Oh! is filled with her reflections on being well over 90 (as of this writing, she will turn 101 at the end of the year). If you are young, Diana Athill will make you reexamine your preconceptions about those who are older; if you are middle age, she will remind you that your life is only yet half lived; if you are entering the "twilight years", she will reaffirm that you are still a vibrant, thinking, feeling person of a value in a totally non-saccharine way. In Alive, Alive, Oh!, her essay "Oh, tell me, Gentle Shepherd, where..." is an astounding rumination on colonization and traveler complicity.
Try Yesterday Morning for her memories of childhood, After a Funeral for her clear record of a very messy relationship that ended in suicide, Make Believe for the story of her friend and lover Hakim Jamal, Stet for her publishing recollections.
To quote another reviewer quoting another reviewer:
There is an introduction to one of her memoirs (Instead of a letter) by Andrea Ashworth, who puts it better than I could:
"Her language combines immediacy, ease and precision of expression"
Hers is a rare kind of candour, she addresses her readers with a strikingly modern lack of squeamishness and secrecy about personal experience, but is never gratuitously shocking or cloyingly confessional."
Born in Norfolk, England in 1917, she worked during the war at BBC Overseas Service in the News Information Department. After the war she worked as an editor, first at Allan Wingate and then at André Deutsch, until her retirement at the age of 75 in 1993. As an editor, she worked with authors such as Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer. In between, she has traveled the world and lived and loved and beautifully set her feelings and observations about life on paper.
She didn't write her memoirs chronologically, and you don't have to read them chronologically (though you mostly could). The first of her books I reads was Somewhere Towards the End, her musings on life as she entered her 90's, and this book, Alive, Alive, Oh! is filled with her reflections on being well over 90 (as of this writing, she will turn 101 at the end of the year). If you are young, Diana Athill will make you reexamine your preconceptions about those who are older; if you are middle age, she will remind you that your life is only yet half lived; if you are entering the "twilight years", she will reaffirm that you are still a vibrant, thinking, feeling person of a value in a totally non-saccharine way. In Alive, Alive, Oh!, her essay "Oh, tell me, Gentle Shepherd, where..." is an astounding rumination on colonization and traveler complicity.
Try Yesterday Morning for her memories of childhood, After a Funeral for her clear record of a very messy relationship that ended in suicide, Make Believe for the story of her friend and lover Hakim Jamal, Stet for her publishing recollections.
To quote another reviewer quoting another reviewer:
There is an introduction to one of her memoirs (Instead of a letter) by Andrea Ashworth, who puts it better than I could:
"Her language combines immediacy, ease and precision of expression"
Hers is a rare kind of candour, she addresses her readers with a strikingly modern lack of squeamishness and secrecy about personal experience, but is never gratuitously shocking or cloyingly confessional."