Experience (2000)
Posters of this memoir’s book jacket, with Amis as a small child nonchalantly smoking a cigarette, were plastered all over the Tube. Some critics really went to town, reviewing the author’s personality rather than the book – not least Julie Burchill. “What a clogged-up, clod-hopping, plate-juggling great show-off he is,” she wrote. This first memoir from Amis nonetheless movingly covered his relationship with his father – the comic novelist Kingsley Amis – and the disappearance of his cousin Lucy Partington in 1973 (who was murdered by Fred West) as well as Amis’s discovery of an unknown daughter, Delilah. Less profound material, such as his dental problems, also featured. And he paid tribute to the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, his stepmother – the person who made him a writer by making him read Pride and Prejudice.
