Category Archives: writing. authors

Reading Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

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A picture is worth a thousand words. A writer might disagree, but I must admit I devour the photos first if they are on offer. Before embarking on Agatha Christie’s 540-page autobiography, I pored over the pictures of Agatha as a chubby toddler with blonde curls; with Archie, her first husband, and surfboard at Honolulu; with her second husband, Max, excavating in the Middle East. What an adventurous life, where family, friendships, travel and practical work dominated. Writing, it appears, was more of a sideline.

To those of us with literary pretensions, it is absurd that Agatha Christie, the best-selling writer of all time, had trouble thinking of herself as a bona fide author. Maybe writing was too much fun. She would start a book by inventing the characters and hatching the plots in her head, before writing them out in snatches between nursing, photographing archaeological artefacts, running a household, buying and doing up houses, and caring for children, relatives and friends. For many years she had no dedicated workspace and parked her typewriter on any convenient table.

Her motivation to write was often fired by the desire to fund her various projects. In later life, when she had plenty of money, she would make a present of her stories to relatives and friends, who would reap the royalties. During the air raids of World War II, aware of the likelihood she would being killed, she wrote a Poirot book for her daughter Rosalind, and a Miss Marple book for Max. Something to cheer them up after the funeral, she told them.

This autobiography is not so much a literary memoir as the fascinating story of a strong, creative woman whose life spanned the late Victorian era, two world wars and on to the frivolous 1970s. Her memory was prodigious. A large part of the book is devoted to her vivid recollections of childhood, before unfolding through two world wars, when she worked as a hospital dispenser, and two marriages, not to mention the creation of dozens of books. After the war, there was a romantic but gruelling journey to the Middle East with Max, and the start of her work in archaeology. The only time we hear her complain is when she rails at Max for making her ride for fourteen hours across the Peloponnese on a mule!

The tempest of her life abated somewhat around the age of fifty. She welcomed this calmer period, ‘the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations…It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.’ It was at this stage she tried her hand at writing plays. ‘The Mousetrap’ opened in 1952 and is still running seventy years on. Not bad for an amateur.

She wrote the final words of her autobiography in 1965, at the age of seventy-five. Although she was a fast writer, this was a side project and took her fifteen years. It is no-nonsense account of a down-to-earth woman, who faced life with hope and pragmatism. She saw it as, ‘not so much a journey back through the past, as a journey forward – starting again at the beginning of it all – going back to the Me who was to embark on that journey forward through time.’

Inspired by Joyce Carol Oates

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It is over three months since I saw Joyce Carol Oates talk at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival. On 26 August, Michael Cathcart interviewed her in his benign and unpretentious manner, but was not a good match for her incisive intellect and wit, and the glassy Deakin Edge venue echoed nastily. Too often, JCO’s precious words bounced away, but fortunately were captured for Cathcart’s Radio National show ‘Books and Arts’. I had prepared myself for the rare treat by reading two volumes of her short stories and her novel Black Water. Much as I admired her work, that was enough for now. There is only so much bleakness I can tolerate, and her short stories go into dark territory. When JCO flew away, I put her books back on the shelf, and turned to more cheerful fare.

Shortly afterwards I came across (in Best American Essays 2016) her essay about her sister, eighteen years younger than Joyce, who developed severe autism as a child and was eventually institutionalised. ‘The Lost Sister: An Elegy’ is a harrowing account, bringing to mind characters and incidents in Oates’s stories, and giving some context to her fiction. To live with a mute and violent sister who never looks any of her family in the eye would surely colour your imagination in shades of black.

On a recent trip to the Murray River I came across a secondhand copy of A Widow’s Story, JCO’s 2011 memoir, a testimony to grief. When her husband of 47 years, Raymond Smith, died, Oates dived into a crazed insomnia and spent the next six months trying to claw her way back from despair. Unlike Joan Didion’s succinct A Year of Magical Thinking, Oates’s memoir is discursive, a 415-page record of a distracted mind haunted by regret and shame, a day-by-day account of survival.

There are some books that make me reluctant to move on and start reading another. A Widow’s Story had that effect on me. Its honest self-exposure has inspired me to make a tentative start on a memoir about living with a daughter who has a mental illness. It is difficult territory, which I have been hesitant to enter, but now I have a light to guide me.

And it appears there is another memoir of JCO’s waiting for me, one day: The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015). It includes a lot of her published nonfiction, including the essay on her sister. I imagine I will come across it one day, at the right time, on a shelf in some dusty rural bookshop.