With notable, largely historical exceptions, literary lives can be disappointingly dull to read about. Not so Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s. Better Broken Than New is the novelist and memoirist’s first book since 2007 and its vivid, sometimes chaotic narrative details – adventures and misadventures enough for multiple lifetimes – leave the reader wondering not from where she derives her creative material but how she’s lived to tell the tale.
Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the apparently murderous ministrations of a racist maternity nurse: along with infidelities and estrangements, these startling occurrences become almost incidental in a volume whose defining dramas run to kidnapping her own five-year-old daughter and then living under police protection, and fighting off a homicidal gang of home invaders with a hunting knife – in her 60s.
