Biography & memoir

GLOWING STILL A WOMAN’S LIFE ON THE ROAD SARA WHEELER

Abacus, 368pp, £22

‘Glowing Still is a thoughtful and entertaining meditation on identity, geography and the position of the self in the world,’ Viv Groskop wrote in the Spectator, a ‘magnificent and unusual book’. ‘Some of the “travel” here is not a journey to a place but instead through her memories …. She turns herself into an expert revisionist guide, reframing voyages from the Antarctic to Paris and from Bangladesh to Russia through the lens of an increasingly uncertain and contradictory 21st-century world. She does this with humour, pathos and genuine curiosity about herself and her work’.

Ian Sansom in the Telegraph regretted that Wheeler has always preferred to travel alone, but decided the book ‘is the next best thing to hopping on board with her.’ among the last. ‘Glowing Still feels oddly comforting and apocalyptic at the same time, like a sepia snapshot of a window of historical opportunity that is rapidly closing,’ Groskop concluded

‘An ingenious piece of work, it’s a set of re-readings of her innumerable journeys over half a century, rethinking what she wrote in previous books’.

HONEY, BABY, MINE LAURA DERN AND DIANE LADD (Coronet, 256pp, £18.99)

Marian Winik in the Washington Post was equally enraptured. ‘A brilliant end-run around the onesidedness of a traditional memoir ... The exchanges convey a rich mixture of love, exasperation, nostalgia and resentment that will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a mother or a daughter. At the same time, they offer rare glimpses behind the curtain of two great Hollywood careers.’

Sleeping On Islands A Life In Poetry Andrew Motion

Faber, 320pp, £20

‘Part of the pleasure of this book is the way Wheeler drops in and out of the world she left behind,’ Caroline Moorehead wrote in the Literary Review. ‘She has structured this, her tenth book, to bring in what she calls the best bits of journeys left out of earlier accounts, while also weaving in thoughts about what it has been like to be a woman travelling on her own through a rapidly changing planet.’

Constance Craig Smith in the Mail found it ‘engrossing’, while Ann Kennedy Smith in the TLS praised ‘a colourful, deceptively capacious carpetbag of a book … an entertaining smorgasbord that allows her to touch on serious issues’. Wheeler’s themes, Smith continued, ‘include economic inequality, increasing evidence of looming climate catastrophe and “minority groups under pressure or gone”’.

From being one of the first intrepid women travellers, Wheeler may be

Mother and daughter actors Diane Ladd and Laura Dern (above) have produced a joint account of two generations of life in Hollywood. They based it on the conversations they had while on the walks that doctors had prescribed for Ladd’s health. The result is, said Helen Brown in the Telegraph, ‘brutal.’ This is the ‘best, truest, most shockingly entertaining Hollywood memoir I’ve ever read. It is also one of the most loving.’ Dern, 56, is the daughter of actor Bruce Dern, who met Ladd when the pair appeared in a 1961 production of Orpheus Descending, by Ladd’s cousin, Tennessee Williams. ‘Most Hollywood autobiographies,’ wrote Brown, ‘are stuffed with therapyendorsed self-exculpation. So its gripping to hear these two Tinseltown titans, Oscar-winning (Dern) and -nominated (Ladd) respectively, holding each other to account.’

In the New York Times, Mary Laura Philpott also enjoyed the revelations. ‘As actors, Dern and Ladd have spent decades peeling back layers to reveal their characters’ fears and desires. It’s when they turn that focus to each other and themselves that something remarkable emerges ... At first it seems a bit repetitive ... They tell funny anecdotes ... Then the tone shifts.’

Former poet laureate and literary elder Andrew Motion’s new memoir received a thorough pasting from young Turk James Marriott in the Times Sleeping on Islands, he wrote, might ‘usefully be described as a meditation on the futility of being Andrew Motion.’ Like Motion’s poetry, he continued, his prose ‘aims at a Wordsworthian solemnity and plainness. The still surface is presumably intended to be suggestive of subaqueous profundities and dramas. But all too often the reader feels he has been confronted with a millpond of a man. The author’s character presents a turbid and unruffled blank.’ Ouch.

David Wheatley, reviewing the book in the Literary Review was more generous, though he noted the ‘committee-pleasing tone’ that creeps into Motion’s accounts of a life spent shinning up the greasy pole of public literary culture. ‘Motion’s acceptance of the laureateship was a calculated risk’, noted Wheatley. ‘Many great writers have been poet laureate, but history has not been kind to those remembered exclusively for their time in that role.’ The ex-laureate, ‘far from enjoying his freedom, takes on yet more committee jobs and honorary presidencies, unsure if his identity is now stuck in civic mode or if he isn’t just “anxious that if I said no to anything, I might disappear from view”.’

In the Daily Telegraph, Tristan Fane Saunders interviewed Motion, who now lives and teaches in Baltimore, and asked him if he regretted ‘writing all those royal poems.’ The answer was ‘Yes! Every day!’. None is included in his New and Selected Poems, but he says he’s not ‘hideously ashamed’ of them.