...
But those are the key moments of Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry's seductively readable chronicle of his first 20 years. Or, more precisely, the 12 years between leaving for preparatory school at the age of eight, and his departure to another prep school, this time as a junior master.
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Stephen Fry is one of the great originals. This autobiography of his first twenty years is ... more
a pleasure to read mixing outrageous acts with sensible opinions in bewildering confusion. That so much outward charm self-awareness and intellect should exist alongside behaviour that threatened to ruin the lives of innocent victims noble parents and Fry himself gives the book a tragic grandeur and lifts it to classic status." - "Financial Times". "A remarkable perhaps even unique exercise in autobiography - that aroma of authenticity that is the point of all great autobiographies; of which this I rather think is one" - "Evening Standard". "He writes superbly about his family about his homosexuality about the agonies of childhood - some of his bursts of smile take the breath away- his most satisfying and appealing book so far" - "Observer".
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Advantages: Funny, honest, humane, readable Disadvantages: Occasional lapses of judgement
...are the key moments of Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry's seductively readable chronicle of his first 20 years. Or, more precisely, the 12 years between leaving for preparatory school at the age of eight, and his departure to another prep school, this time as a junior master.
Like many others, I admire Stephen Fry. My favourite comedy has always been that which delights in the richness and absurdity of the English language. And that ... ...I had still not read Moab Is My Washpot. Let this review be my penance.
Fry proves his skill as a writer from the very first pages. He dispenses with the traditional tedious preamble about the birthplaces of great-grandparents. Instead he plunges straight into a pivotal episode from his childhood. In just a few pages he has fixed his young self within family, social class and character. And all in an account of a few minutes in a stationary ... more
One suspension from school, two expulsions, underage sex, a suicide attempt, arrest and imprisonment. A proud CV for your average ASBO. A more surprising series of events for a bright public schoolboy in the 1970s.
But those are the key moments of Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry's seductively readable chronicle of his first 20 years. Or, more precisely, the 12 years between leaving for preparatory school at the age of eight, and his departure to another prep school, this time as a junior master.
Like many others, I admire Stephen Fry. My favourite comedy has always been that which delights in the richness and absurdity of the English language. And that is where Fry excels. I first noticed his talent in his short radio essays back in the 1980s, for which he adopted the guise of stuffy academic Donald Trefusis.
I've since followed with pleasure his progression from comedy performer, actor, TV presenter and novelist to his current status as National Treasure. So it's pretty shameful that nearly 10 years after he wrote it, I had still not read Moab Is My Washpot. Let this review be my penance.
Fry proves his skill as a writer from the very first pages. He dispenses with the traditional tedious preamble about the birthplaces of great-grandparents. Instead he plunges straight into a pivotal episode from his childhood. In just a few pages he has fixed his young self within family, social class and character. And all in an account of a few minutes in a stationary railway carriage bound for a far-off prep school. (No wonder he was the perfect choice to read the Harry Potter audiobooks.)
The train of Fry's life story, however, takes off. Along looping branch lines of digression, past insights into family relationships and observations about contemporary Britain, he plunges into long tunnels of schoolboy humiliation. And we never return to his point of departure because, eventually, he goes off the rails.
He is, as you would expect, frighteningly learned and literate throughout. His tone is often nostalgic, but rarely descends into sentimentality. For a book which shows him to have been an accomplished thief and a liar, most of the book is painfully honest.
I cringed only twice during its 434 pages. The first was after a vicious tirade against school games, in which he describes the masters as "barely-literate pithecanthropoids". He then does a sudden volte-face, saying that the teachers "weren't stupid, they weren't mean".
The second cringe came when, describing one of his early heterosexual relationships, he coins the word "ensnogglement" - ugh! My distaste at both examples came from the fact that, unlike the vast majority of the book, they just don't ring true.
For there is genuine pain and anger everywhere in this book. But they are balanced by pleasures. There's nostalgia aplenty for readers of a certain age (ie me, being only a year or so younger than Fry). His litany of long-vanished sweeties will provide a Proustian rush for those who nurtured their dental cavities in the sixties.
And at every turn there is the wit and insight without which you would feel seriously short-changed. In fact, I reckon I laughed on average once every two-and-a-half pages. Maybe not always proper goat-falling-downstairs noises, but certainly smirks or snorts. Few people would read this book stony-faced. Though I should mention, for those of tender sensibilities, that the language is strong, as are the descriptions of schoolboy homosexuality.
I laughed, for instance, when he told a school master that he had decided to change his name - to Peregrine Ainsley Whatenough. (The teacher crisply tells him not to be an arse.) I laughed when he concluded a long, despairing denunciation of his musical ineptitude: "Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing - they are not all bad."
I cheered when he revealed the sources of his love of language: the inimitable Vivian Stanshall (late of the Bonzo Dog Band), P G Wodehouse and Conan Doyle. And goddammit, there seemed to be something in my eye as he recounted his mother's lonely tears on his eighteenth birthday, a day he spent as a missing person, on the run, and running up debts on stolen credit cards.
Apart from the laughter and the tears, as you'd expect from one so ferociously clever, Fry can't resist sharing his wisdom. His soapbox moments can be slightly distracting, but they usually emerge organically from events in his life. So he expresses both anger and affection for the system which produced him. He prefaces the section on his senior school days with a long discussion of the English character, complete with lengthy passages from EM Forster. Later in the book, he quotes his own early Byronic verse epic, on which he worked for several years - although he self-deprecatingly describes it as doggerel.
But Fry is generally not merely self-deprecating, he is self-lacerating, almost to the point of self-indulgence. Yet for all the agonising introspection in these pages, I still felt there was a void: we never learn the real source of his self-destructive urges. Why did he become (to paraphrase Cyril Connolly, whom Fry also quotes) the enemy of his own promise?
His sister, brother and many of his close friends all emerged unscathed from the same background and the same system. Only Stephen had to be different. You needn't be much of an amateur psychoanalyst to locate one reason: his relationship with his brilliant but distant father. Maybe to pinpoint it explicitly would be just too painful - for both of them.
Or could the answer be simpler? Did he place obstacles on the smooth track of his privileged life partly to make it more exciting? A clue comes in one of his Wildean pronouncements (he is of course, on first-name terms with Oscar): "It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with."
Paperback edition published by Arrow Books
ISBN: 0099457040
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Advantages: Witty, intellegent and honest. No self-pity or bleame-placing. Disadvantages: Can sometimes come accross as smug.
...all things dirty and bad. Moab was a nation which found displeasure with God because of "her overweening pride and conceit, her pride and arrogance and the haughtiness of her heart." Oddly enough, Fry never makes a reference to the phrase in the book or provides any explanation to his choice – it is for the reader to draw their own assumptions or to google it as I did. In an interview with the Evening Standard Fry glibly states, “If you knew the ... ...his first love. Some of Moab is my Washpot is apparently a non-fiction version of The Liar (a novel also written by Fry) acknowledged by Fry in Moab. As I haven’t yet read The Liar, I can neither confirm nor deny this.
What I particularly liked where the little gems that came out now and again like how Fry began his love for the character of Jeeves and the writing of P G Woodhouse, about his ancestry and his maternal grandfather. Sandwiched in the ...
MAFARRIMOND 12.06.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
Advantages: insightful Disadvantages: first 20 years only
Having read the book, I still only have a vague idea of what on earth the title is going on about, but never mind. "Moab" is an autobiography, recounting the first 20 years or so of Stephen Fry's life. It's an interesting, alarmingly honest sort of book. Stephen Fry was educated in prep schools (in Uley of all places, very close to where I used to live) and public school. It will not shock his fans to learn that he wasn't that good at fitting in ... ...he was always a bit of a pretentious oddball and that he knew he was gay from a fairly early age. Some details about his less pleasant youthfull exploits cast him in somthing of a different light, and his honesty in discussing the less appealing parts of his nature is surprising. "Moab" offers some insight into the Fry family background, but mostly concentrates on Stephen's early expereinces, with the odd dash of more modern references. There's a ...
Bryn_Pearson 13.08.2002
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
Advantages: Very very honest - unusual for a celebrity Disadvantages: Uncomfortable reading at times, stops too soon!
...his life. Since I've read Moab Is My Washpot there has been this annoying question hanging over me: "How did this troubled, confused, oddball young man go from being in a detention centre for credit card fraud to becoming Stephen Fry as we know him today?" Why did Fry end it there? Yes, it's a contrast to Fry's celebrity persona and drives home the fact that you can get up from rock bottom, but still leaves me asking 'how?' Most people would focus ... ...teen years as a 'confused time' and trying to find reasons for the way their life's turned out in their childhood. Not Stephen Fry.
I haven't read many autobiographies before, but this really wasn't what I expected. The detail was surprising and sometimes shocking, making you appreciate what an honest account this is - Fry doesn't omit incidents, feelings or relationships just to save face now he's a celebrity. It's uncomfortable to read at times ...
DoubleFantasy11 11.08.2005
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
Advantages: Absorbing, funny, and very, very readable. Disadvantages: Not for the easily offended!
...of his Jewish ancestry: Hence the title of this autobiography, which is taken from Psalm 60. Moab was an ancient region by the Dead Sea, said to have been settled by the descendants of Lot who, you may remember, fled from the destruction of Sodom. Any irony here, I wonder?. ...
Cernunnos 20.01.2003
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry
This autobiography is an immensely enjoyable read. Stephen's early life was certainly troubled, but makes for fascinating and hilarious reading- he writes about his first twenty years with a complete lack of whining or self-pity, and is unafraid to show the reader his own very grave failings. Fry's wit and candour make this book very difficult to put down - and is the best book i have read in a long while. His use of the english language is spellbinding, ...
nicolabarnham 27.01.2009
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Advantages: You can do two things at once... put this on while driving the car etc. Disadvantages: Due to subject matter it should be stamped with a large (18)
of Fry & Laurie" on TV, "Saturday Night Fry" on the radio, I found a video of the film "Wilde" hidden on the window sill, and an old VHS of the film "Peter's Friends". I'm not really obsessed as such. Just grateful that my Dad introduced me to the talented Mr Fry from a young age, letting me discover everything from Comedy to Classic FM with an added eccentric touch.
It was also my Dad who let me take with me the neat set of Cassette tapes that make up StephenFry's "MoabismyWashpot, An Autobiography, Read by the Author". I listened to all 12 hours of StephenFry's characteristic deep voice over a matter of days, whilst painting, whilst eating, whilst playing computer games... In fact I haven't done much Uni work in quite a while. The eight double-sided cassettes are stacked into four clear-plastic cases. These in turn slide into a handy ...
Advantages: Hilarious, intriguing questions Disadvantages: Doesn't live up to its potential
't expect all of these questions to be answered - or, indeed, any of them. Fry utilizes the concept of "unreliable narrator" in a way, which I feel would have been more striking if the novel had been written in the first person. The novel is in the third person, but the story is told mainly through Adrian's point of view and the reader empathizes with him. Although he's not a particularly likeable character, Adrian has a lot of spirit and his flaws are intriguing.
There is a strong autobiographical element to The Liar, which is evident if you've ever read Fry's autobiography of the first twenty years or so of his life, MoabIsMyWashpot. Like StephenFry, Adrian has the privilege of a private education and attends Cambridge - though I should imagine that he, unlike Adrian, didn't cheat his way in! There's also a scientist father and various ...
Product Information for "Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry" »
Product details
Type
Non-Fiction
Genre
Biography
Title
Moab is My Washpot
Author
Stephen Fry
ISBN
0091801613; 0099457040; 0099727315; 1569472025
Manufacturer's product description
A humorous autobiography that covers the author's time at public school, his acting and writing career and the ups and downs of his personal life. Fry is disarmingly frank about the very private man behind the public face.
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