Fall Out: A Memoir of Friends Made and Friends Unmade

by Janet Street-Porter

Friends. Everyone needs them. Especially when relations between you and your family are less than perfect. And for the talented and ambitious Janet Street-Porter, her friends became her family. is the story of these vibrant characters – some famous, some infamous, all extraordinary – and their often volatile relationships with her. Above all, it is a portrait of an exciting and creative era, by someone who lived it to the full.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

320 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 25, 2006

Reviews

[The Bookish Wombat · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked this less than I did the first volume of JSP's memoirs. This just seems to be one long name-dropping exercise and while it tells you what the author did in the 60s and 70s it doesn't give much of an insight into her character or why she did things.

[Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as engaging as Baggage, but still hugely entertaining. If you're not a Janet admirer before reading this, it's unlikely to change your opinion!

[Carla · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very honest sometimes brutal story. I admire Janet greatly and can't wait for the next instalment.

[Colleen Blogg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.I think this woman is FAB.

[David Seligman · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Britain's great media personalities; forthright and unpretentious , her biographical writing is as entertaining as her television appearances

[Matthew Mclane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subtitle for this book - A Memoir of Friends Made and Friends Unmade - suggests that it’ll be a journey of Janet ruthlessly cutting out deadweight from her life, very much in keeping with her no-nonsense attitude. I thought it might even include advice on how you can do the same with friends you wish to be ‘unmade’.

It’s not, though. Instead, it’s a list of projects that Janet undertook as a fledgling journalist and broadcaster, interspersed with anecdotes of people she met. Some of it is quite entertaining but there’s very little of the titular Fall Out.

[Pamela Hamilton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not as good as Baggage.

[Norma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I loved her first book Baggage but this wasn’t doing anything for me. I gave up a quarter of the way through.

[Bill Talbott · Rating 5 out of 5]

JSP… Fall Out

Excellent read. A fan of this great lady for life. Need more to read.
First and second book mesmerising reading

[Kay Townsend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the best book I've ever read but was readable.

[λee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How many friends do you really need? As many as fill an address book? As many as you can count on the fingers of two hands? If you've grown up with the kind of parents I had, then your friends are your family. But friendship isn't like a blood relationship, it morphs and changes according to the times. Friends are conduits to exploring the moment to the full, they take you places you would never have got to alone.. and then the time arrives when friends become baggage, and the painful process starts of gradually shedding them to make room for new acquaintances, new experiences, new challenges and new delights to enjoy. You can call me ruthless, driven, single-minded, self-centred -- and you'd be right. My journey through life has encompassed newspapers, television, radio, the art world and the theatre. I've been married many times, lived with people almost continually from the age of eighteen when I first ran away from home. Along the way I've had intense relationships with like-minded people, and then I've moved on. They are the enablers, who provided me with access all areas in their particular field -- and then, just as swiftly as I needed to know them, I reluctantly discard them. There's the guilt to live with, but nothing ever stops the inevitable process."

This is the opening paragraph of Fall Out. If, like me, it makes you want to weep and thump your chest then punch the air and sit down in front of a new word document to unapologetically honour all the people briefly important to you in what feels like another lifetime, then please do! And let me read it! I will literally pay you! Because beyond the first chapter JSP's memoir really didn't live up to its introduction :( Though engaging enough as a record of all the interesting people populating the social whirl of her early twenties in 60s/70s media-world London (she slept with John Hurt! she was rude to Leonard Cohen once!), the stories suffer from a marked lack of illustrated intimacy, so it's difficult to notice, much less care, when someone meaningful slips in or out of her life. It seems like this is the general feedback on her previous memoir too, about her childhood, and disconnection from her parents and surroundings. Beyond casual narcissism, you get the feeling she's so immersed in her own perspective of the world that she struggles to communicate the weight of her experiences. It's a shame.

If this woman ever writes an entire tome just of descriptions of her clothing and interior decoration designs though, I would urge you all to snap a copy up pronto. I could've read that shit for days.


Edit: It's over a year later and I still think about this book on a weekly basis, go figure. Stand by my criticism above, but what can I say, the woman's got charisma.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hmmm....well I enjoyed reading about the people of the times, especially Allen Jones who had a family connection to me at one time in the 1980s. (We had a garden bench which was the form of a woman in our garden for a bit!) However much I like JSP I do think the writing in this book is pretty dire for a journalist. It reads like she rushed it out to please publishers, or something. I read it in a day so I can't say I disliked it, just thought that Baggage was much better. Is this because we who have grown up in a family can relate to some of the teenage and school years stuff? I don't know....

[Ionanbd · Rating 3 out of 5]

2,5 t'apporte rien mais les vibes sont sympa