Fay Weldon Auto da Fay, review by Pat Boran

Auto da Fay. Fay Weldon. Flamingo. UK £15.99 HB.

review by Pat Boran
(Originally published in the Irish Independent)

When the Birkinshaw family returned from New Zealand to a battle-scarred London after the war, the young Fay could see that 'the England my mother had left was gone forever'.

A similar sense of a society struggling to cope with change drives the best of Weldon's writing. That she was hailed as a champion of feminism, for example, only later to be seen as one of its more unkind critics, shows that those forces are continually active even inside of her own thinking.

Given this fact, the prospect of a memoir, with its demand for plot and even some kind of resolution, understandably presents some difficulties. Weldon's solution, in this cleverly titled memoir, is to trace just her first 32 years as if it were a unit, 'because you can get your young life into a pattern'.

From her birth in London in 1931, therefore, through her New Zealand childhood in an all-female household, and on though student years in Scotland, an unplanned pregnancy at 19, and finally a second marriage that would last for 31 years (before finally ending in divorce), the survival story depicted in this book seems to have more to do with chance, good humour and a pretty irresistible charm than with any sense of clear planning.

To her credit, Weldon doesn't try to tie it all up too neatly. Instead she allows the narrative to reveal itself through the small episodes that memory is made of: knitting balaclavas in school for the war effort; getting caught by her mother reading Marie Stopes's Married Love; learning ingenious thieving techniques from other chambermaids in her late teens.

In fact, for a memoir which doesn't even make it up to the period when Weldon was to become one of the most discussed writers of her time, Auto da Fay is a remarkable book: warm, witty, sustained by but constantly joshing with the idea of how a writer is made. From the almost hypnotising cover painting onwards, its clear that self-invention and -reinvention are much of what this very entertaining half-life is about.