I seldom excoriate books I've read, but this one is so self-important and trumped up that I feel obliged to warn other readers away from its pretentious pages. Martin does provide some very touching and real moments, and it is the more emotional of the two, but the flaws I’ve always found in Martin’s writing are still in evidence. Le lettere che, con molta onestà, Martin introduce tra i paragrafi ci mostrano un giovane spocchiosetto sullo stile del protagonista di The Rachel papers, che arranca all'ombra di un padre ingombrante e pertanto deve farsi un'idea alla svelta dei grandi della letteratura prima di tentare l'esame per Oxford.

I’ve read and enjoyed and admired some of his novels but always have the feeling I need a rest of around ten years between each one.However, it’s impossible to deny that he was a witty old bugger and there are some genuinely laugh out loud lines.

Come un esperto equilibrista Amis si muove sul filo di un racconto esemplare: commovente e ironico, sobrio e vibrante insieme.

Martin Amis, scrittore postmoderno, figlio di Kingsley Amis, a sua volta noto poeta; scrittore e critico letterario britannico, traccia un profilo dei suoi anni di gioventù fino alla maturità, un racconto discontinuo sul piano cronologico però molto avvincente su quello umano. He has changed so much since young adulthood that he thinks of himself as a completely different person. Amis does his best to save her from the posthumous epitaph of helpless victim – in particular refuting Fred’s heinous tale that she wanted to introduce him to her parents - and to tell us about who she was and why he hopes, and believes, when darker thoughts enter his mind, that it was all over quickly for her. Letters from School" (and then College) to Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard (Martin's stepmother from 1965 to 1983) are interspersed between the chapters of the first part of the memoir, giving a glimpse of the young Martin and his academic (and other) tribulations as he crams for (and then at) Oxford. I was a reluctant fan of the man before (wholehearted of his writing, though, I should make clear) but this memoir brings me into the fold.

Jackie Wullschlager wrote in the Financial Times: "The core here is family, and it is movingly, beautifully, evoked.

con la differenza, rispetto ai romanzi, che qui abbassando ovviamente l’asticella del sarcasmo martin amis mostra come sa praticare la chirurgia dell’intelligenza anche quando non ci sono freddezza e distacco. He readily acknowledges the nepotism that got him published and widely reviewed at the age of twenty-one. There's his huge jerk of a famous father, there's a missing cousin, there's a child he knew nothing of. When it came time to take the test, Amis leaned on his enigmatic writing style to impress his test reviewers. ho trovato viceversa, in questo libro, molta onestà intellettuale e una dose sufficiente di autoironia perché l’inevitabile riferimento, per esempio, agli scrittori e ai personaggi frequentati fin da quando era bambino non finisca per scivolare in odore di name-dropping.