Auto da Fay

by Fay Weldon

From life as a poor unwed mother in London to becoming one of England's bestselling authors and most popular exports, Fay Weldon has crammed more than most into her years. Wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, antifeminist, winer and diner—Fay leads us through her peripatetic life with barely a role she can't illuminate.

Born Franklin Birkinshaw in 1931, Fay spent most of her youth in New Zealand. With her glamorous father, a philandering doctor, generally absent, Fay's intrepid mother and bohemian grandmother raised her along with her sister, Jane. Brought up among women, Fay found men a mystery until the swinging sixties in London where she gradually became a central figure among the writers, artists, and thinkers. She has maintained this unique position through four turbulent decades. At first, she managed to scrape along, penning winning advertising slogans, before she began to write fiction. As this memoir comes to a close, we witness the stirring of her first novel.

Riddled with Weldon's customarily fierce opinions, this frank and absorbing memoir is vintage Fay. An icon to many, a thorn in the flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. With this engaging autobiography, she has finally decided to turn her authorial wit and keen eye on . . . herself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Autobiography, Memoir, Biography, Biography Memoir, History, British Literature

384 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrayed contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay_Weldon

Reviews

[Pauline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Things get quite rough for Fay Weldon, and her mother, her sister, her grandmother, her aunty, and their children in this book, but they battle on. Trying to solve the puzzle of men, at the source of all the trouble, Weldon makes a couple of bad calls early on, and lives to fight another day, to the cheers of once were lost girls the world over.
What's clear is that before she became a writer Weldon stored up an immense stock of experience: New Zealand in the thirties and forties, post-war London, economics and psychology at St Andrews, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office and writing copy and producing some of the earliest television advertising, raising children as an unmarried mother, and caring for her desperately ill sister.
The same qualities that saw her safely through all this make this an entertaining read: she gets on with things, and when one persona reaches the limit of its usefulness, adopts another. It's all part of the journey.
Just so I don't forget, here's 'people skills' according to Weldon:
"Regard one enemy as too many, a thousand friends as not enough. Say something nice before you say something nasty. Always praise before you blame. Deliver the good news first, then the bad. If there's any blame floating around, take it, even though it's nothing to do with you: others will be grateful that you carry the burden. Realize that today's scapegoat is tomorrow's hero, and vice versa. People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said. Never defend yourself: agree with your critics, it takes the wind out of their sails." (p328).

[Candice · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a life. Much of it was very stressful and chaotic, and yet she presents it without any self-pity, using her signature acerbic humor and wise, observant reflections. Now I must continue to read everything she has ever written.

"Youth gives a sense of new days dawning bright, going on forever, and a kind of tamped down excitement which keeps breaking through even the worst days of poverty, depression, and loneliness. But then youth is something which only exists in retrospect: you are barely conscious of it while you have it. I can scarcely go into mourning for it now. What would be the point?"

"She would have to get married, and fast. She would donate her sexual and domestic services in exchange for bed and board for herself and her child. It was really no more than what the good girls did: hadn’t George Bernard Shaw likened marriage to slavery? The good girls could choose their masters, of course, and surround the bride sale with orange blossom and tulle, to cloud the issue of the transactional nature of what was going on, but that was about all. It was she and her friends, the bad girls, the wild girls, who did not see sex as trade: they waited for true love, and continued in the stubborn belief that though they lay down with wolves, they would wake up with lovers. And sometimes, just sometimes, it happened. But the great majority married where self-interest lay: now she would do the same."

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply stunning. Love Fay Weldon and can't believe I've left it so long to read her autobiography. She is wise and witty and I learned so much from this book.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weldon is a talented author, but I thought the ending of the book was a bit abrupt. When she marries Weldon I think she's saying that writing took over and her personal life was a minor player.

[Sue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fluid, fluent and very readable memoir. Fay Weldon has never been a pretentious writer. Her work is always concise, not for her the 20 line sentence or the deliberate use of obscure or obsolete words and quotes.

She gives us her relationships rather than her career as a writer, though it soon becomes obvious how writing was always her destiny. It runs in her blood and her genes.

She gives us characters in the form of her father, a distant figure and her mother too often very present. Her doomed sister, her grandmother, her lovers, ghosts, husbands and friends abound. Most of the really important people are the women. The men are culturally dominant and usually unreliable, she shows the reasons for feminism before modern feminism began.

Her novels are mentioned, but in flash-forwards. Is there a second volume of this memoir?

Fay Weldon is now, in the 2020's, no longer such a fashionable writer but god is she important.

[Maria Donovan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fay Weldon is a writer whose work, particularly her short story 'Weekend', has influenced me in the past. Having met her and been the recipient of her kindness I was interested to know more about her early life. This autobiography takes us through the years before she finds success as a writer. I enjoyed its honesty and humour and the flashes of recognition: things from life that have bled into her fiction. All in all I just like her more than ever having read this. And am intrigued to read the next instalment.

[Suzy Espersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bedømmelsen er baseret på, jeg hørte den som lydbog på dansk. Det er ikke en særlig god oversættelse, men værst er dog oplæseren. Jeg har virkelig ikke behov for at høre hende synge! Derimod ville det være opløftende, om hun kunne udtale de engelske navne. Alt dette kan Weldon jo på ingen måde gøre for, og jeg finder historien interessant og sågar spændende. Den har helt sikkert også været velskrevet på kildesproget.

[Nancy Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a reader of Fay Weldon books, you will love her backstory. It depicts a time when it was possible to leave university with all your belongings in one suitcase, marry a man for financial security, lead a life that you hate, divorce that man, marry another man, discover his inability to accept his wife's many successes, and then move on. I couldn't put this down.

[Robin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Weldon is doing something interesting in this memoir, as she spirals her stories with those of her sister, her mother, her grandmother to find the patterns that explain the courses of their lives. Instead of a chronological narrative, it reads more like a series of letters from an interesting friend which reveal more and more as the relationship continues.

[Gill James · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a writer I always enjoy reading about the lives of other writers. This was fascinating though I would have liked to know more about how Fay Weldon actually became a writer.
I enjoyed the short, sharp, beautifully written chapters. And the fact they there were only chapters headings, no numbers.
In later chapters she becomes quite reflective but I prefer the earlier ones where she shows us her life instead of telling us about it.

[David Burns · Rating 3 out of 5]

Auto da Fay ** Read in Mzuzu and Lilongwe, Malawi (April 2023)

[Katy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate to say it, but what a waste of time. Cannot believe that Fay Weldon wrote this

[Sidsel Sander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fin autobiografi, men jeg vil nu hellere læse hendes skønlitterære forfatterskab.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always been intrigued by the works of Fay Weldon, so I was glad to stumble on this memoir. Told in a series of vignettes, it's clear that Weldon's life has always been complicated. Yet even with all the difficulties and challenges, she manages to move along, move ahead, and in the end to thrive.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007k1d3

Description: From the 1930s to the 1990s, Fay Weldon has seen and lived our times. As a child in New Zealand, as young and poor in London, as unmarried mother, as wife, lover, playwright, novelist, feminist, anti-feminist, spag-bol-cook, winer-and-diner, there are few waterfronts that she hasn't covered, few battles she hasn't fought. An icon to many, a thorn-in-the-flesh to others, she has never failed to excite, madden, or interest. Her life and times cover love, sex, babies, blokes, poverty, work, politics, and Very Famous Names.

Novelist and playwright Fay Weldon reads her own honest, sometimes painful, often funny, account of a life

Fay recalls leaving her family and New Zealand behind.well lived.

Reading from her autobiography, Fay Weldon is rebellious and has developed a 'reputation' for being a bad girl.

[Iain Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Writer autobiographies are usually good (David Lodge, Rose Tremain) and this is exceptional. Full of insightful quotes: 'a pram in the hallway is the worst enemy of good art' , 'those heady days when education was for its own sake, not to get you a job'; 'i never doubted there is telepathy between family members'; 'managers fear the disgruntled, scapegoated employee, who does not take lightly the fearful blow to his self esteem'. 'Write truth and no one believes you, it's too alarming'. 'My party dress turned me into a pinky foam mountain...my life was unsustainable...in the morning, oddly, i was still alive'.
In Saffron Walden, theres a ghost in the house. I sympathised with her inability to cope with science, and the aborted medical career. Grandma Nona knew Jean Rhys (louche), Pound, (played piano with his nose) Shaw, Wells, De la Mare (spooky and paranormal). There were various writers, musicians and politicians in her ancestry: I had to construct a family tree on the inside front cover to keep up with it all.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting autobigoraphy of an interesting person's interesting life. It is wrtten with all the flair of (most) of her novels; just about all of which I have read since her career took off in the sevenites. That is caeer as anovelist. She already held a degree in economics before trying her hand at writting advertising copy (very successfully) before moving on to scriptwriting for drama (also a highly successful venture - think first series of "Upstairs-Downstairs")before her feminist views causued her to fall out with the establishment. Jane Austen fans should read her (paper or novel?)"Letters to Alice..." in which she discusses the life and times with her Goth-cum-Punk niece, subtly making the point how lucky the girl is to live in modern times, by answering the girl's questions about the life and times of Jane.

[Pam Templeton · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderfully witty account of her eventful life. Particularly enjoyed her account of her eccentric family and the early bohemian set, with more than it's fair share of writers, ratbags and tragic muses. From her childhood in New Zealand in the 1940s and 50's, to her adult life in England. Written with honesty and bravery, her life is framed by a series of identities as she goes through untold transformations and challenges. Solo mother, divorcee, guardian to her nieces. Her working life is a random résumé - chambermaid, intelligence gatherer for the Foreign Office, advertising copywriter, then writer for the BBC ('Upstairs Downstairs', etc.) Take a peek into the dystopia of the early Bohemian Society, the Bloomsbury set, St Ives, the early days of British advertising and television and the many writers she worked amongst.

[Odumnobles · Rating 1 out of 5]

Since this is a writer's autobiography, I had hoped to get some information about how one becomes a writer. What I found instead was a confessional of someone who should have been in a convent being fitted for a chastity belt. Lesson learned. If your daughter has no self-esteem and will do anything to fit in, keep her away from all men no matter what age or marital status. Not entertaining in the least.

[Elisabeth Winkler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fay Weldon gets right to the heart of her childhood and upbringing taking the reader from literary London to provincial and impoverished New Zealand, and back in her twenties to (almost-swinging) London and the gradual transformation into her writer self. Not a spare word, memories conjured in snappy paragraphs with wise and worldly summing-up in one-liners. Brilliant.

[Liz Nuttall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliantly written autobiography. What a life! Interesting to discover how her writing talent was honed in advertising and to learn that she was responsible for so many famous slogans of the sixties and seventies. I prefer her autobiographical writing to her novels.

[Lisa Jobin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated this book.

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not encourage me to read her fiction .

[Penny Grubb · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible story, brilliantly well told. This book took me all the way across the Atlantic and that's my ultimate test for a compulsive read.

[Kermitka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very refreshing with good old dark British humor that I like and it shows that success may come pretty late in life and so what....

[Rebecca]

Another one I was just getting into and left in my dad's car. Just got it back...

[Joy Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

very readable book of an interesting life