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How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits
WINNER OF THE 2012 PEN/ACKERLEY PRIZE A haunting memoir on the nature of belonging and the lure of escape. In this series of five brilliantly written and irrepressibly quirky travelogues, Duncan Fallowell sets out to odd corners of the world in pursuit of some extraordinary and improbable characters who were, in most cases, momentarily famous or infamous and then simply disappeared. From an out-of-season Gozo and a becalmed Indian hill-town; to a remote Scottish island, where a German artist vanished immediately after he had bought a large island in the Hebrides, and a Welsh fishing village, where Fallowell tracks down the model for Sebastian Flyte, the aristocratic anti-hero of Evelyn Waugh s "Brideshead Revisited," "How to Disappear "winds through the eerie abyss that can open up between someone or something being both real and phantom. Written with a fierce intelligence and charmingly offbeat humour, "How to Disappear" is one of the most unusual autobiographies not to mention collection of travellers tales ever written.
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First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 23, 2012
This morning I decided to finish Duncan Fallowell's How To Disappear, after abandoning it several months ago. I opened to the essay entitled "Who was Alastair Graham?" which begins
Alastair Graham, it turns out, was a man Fallowell met at a pub in New Quay, Wales – "getting on in years and bald, with a trim grey beard, and dressed spotlessly in yachting clothes: sail-cloth trousers with knife-edge creases, a navy-blue jersey, slip-on deck shoes" and perfectly manicured fingernails white from base to tip. They exchange a few words. Duncan mentions that he's been reading Evelyn Waugh.
I rate this book as highly as I do if only because it's so peculiar. The only other book I've read by Fallowell is One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg, which left me feeling as if I'd awakened from a fever. This book is more uneven in its narrative, but equally haunted by synchronicity and stray bits of rueful wisdom.
"The crucial factor in all adventures is the gift." Eros and melancholy, two kinds of gift, or two aspects of one. No one else writes books like this – minor memories, muddled mysteries that luminesce then disappear.
At the end of the nineteen-seventies I was living in the small town of Hay-on-Wye writing a book.Until three days ago I'd never heard of Hay-on-Wye – a small English town on the border of Wales – until, that is, I read Mark Haddon's The Red House which is set in that very town. Somehow I wasn't surprised. This kind of coincidence is exactly what Fallowell's writing depends upon.
Alastair Graham, it turns out, was a man Fallowell met at a pub in New Quay, Wales – "getting on in years and bald, with a trim grey beard, and dressed spotlessly in yachting clothes: sail-cloth trousers with knife-edge creases, a navy-blue jersey, slip-on deck shoes" and perfectly manicured fingernails white from base to tip. They exchange a few words. Duncan mentions that he's been reading Evelyn Waugh.
When I advanced the idea that although well-endowed as a writer, Waugh's later work was undermined by the progressive narrowing of his sympathies, the old man uttered an extraordinary remark.It so happens that old Mr. Graham is the original Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited, but this discovery takes Duncan several more years of chance conversation and sporadic investigation to establish completely, and the tale, fittingly, turns out to be just as strange and sad as the fictional version.
"He wasn't well-endowed in the other sense, I'm afraid."
I rate this book as highly as I do if only because it's so peculiar. The only other book I've read by Fallowell is One Hot Summer in St. Petersburg, which left me feeling as if I'd awakened from a fever. This book is more uneven in its narrative, but equally haunted by synchronicity and stray bits of rueful wisdom.
"The crucial factor in all adventures is the gift." Eros and melancholy, two kinds of gift, or two aspects of one. No one else writes books like this – minor memories, muddled mysteries that luminesce then disappear.
August 16, 2025
This is a brilliant book by a wonderfully unique writer - it is very much of its time, the 1980s and 1990s and very British in that it is waspish and very observant of social nuances - his portrait of the socially obsessed social climber Bapsy Pavry is a masterful portrayal of a life of utter futility and pointlessness. His portrait of the original version of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited is wonderfully sharp on his character and Waugh. I consider the high praise the book receives in a review from the author Felice Picano, here on Goodreads, another reason for anyone to read this book.
April 22, 2012
This is a very strange but very lovely book. It purports to be a kind of travel journalism, but is really a series of meditations on various 'misfits', individuals that Fallowell comes into contact with (in usually chance ways) and who he becomes fascinated with. The people having nothing in common other than they are all eccentrics and all touch him in some way. All the stories are incomplete, and have as much to do with the author's reactions to them as anything else. My favourite chapter was that dealing with Alistair Graham, a former lover of Evelyn Waugh and the primary inspiration for Brideshead Revisited. For anyone with an interest in that novel this chapter is absolutly fascinating but Fallowell makes his accounts of his characters interesting to anyone. His writing is unpretentious and heartfelt but also intelligent and witty. His take on the death of Princess Diana was a breath of fresh air after so much cynical revisionism.
The book is also beautifully presented, with real effort having gone into every aspect of its appearence. A thing to treasure.
The book is also beautifully presented, with real effort having gone into every aspect of its appearence. A thing to treasure.
October 26, 2019
There was a distinct...i wouldn’t call it a genre, more a trend in British non-fiction (and, occasionally, fiction) writing from the 1980s and early 1990s. Conversational, often digressive, underpinned by an authority that seems to be taken not just for granted, but as obvious. For good or for bad, these were simpler times. When indeed there was an Establishment with (for those who needed to know) clear boundaries.
(If you didn’t need to know, it didn’t matter - so long as you remembered to remember your place.)
This book belongs to this trend, which marks it out as a bit out of time. For what it’s worth, it’s not a bad book. Some parts are thoughtful, insightful, entertaining, and quite sharp. But other parts are overblown and flabby, untested and as such often unformed.
(Following my theory further. We don’t have ‘diversity’ today. At best, a changing of the guards. In a while, a new order will emerge, the cards shuffled but the basic understanding the same. Why does this matter? Because publishing, as a whole, was dominated by creators, producers, and gatekeepers from a very slender skein. Editors, publishers, writers and reviewers all subscribed to the same basic understandings of how the world worked/ought to work, and rarely paused to question why it worked thus.)
This book is about a collection of characters who, for one reason or another but generally tied to an underlying eccentricity, chose to remove themselves from the social pedestal they once occupied, or could have been expected to occupy. The keys here are two. ‘Social’ reflects the trend I mentioned above. Which is fine, because it says a fair interesting bit about this world. But is not because it mistakes quotidian oddities for matters of inherent profundity. The second is that the author doesn’t interrogate himself as much as he should, given that his perambulations are the core of this shortish book.
His obsession with Bapsy, an erratic social climber is too long and too woolly to truly engage - although a short meditation on relationships, near the end, is thoughtful. An essay about the presumed model for Sebastian Flyte becomes a very sharp essay about the Evelyn Waugh’s determined pursuit of social privilege...
Actually, an unstated linkage of people and things seeking - with varying degrees of success - to bridge the gap between being up there and embedded in the hoi polloi. With our author, as arbiter, naturally being a part of the former.
His peregrinations just aren’t enough to sustain the conceit - and more to the point actually belong in the world he seeks to critique. And this isn’t the only lapse that author doesn’t see, editor doesn’t recognise, and tastemakers don’t question. (The book has a PEN award for memoir. Not being sniffy when I say that it must have been a thin year). He harasses the proto-Sebastian Flyte, and in much the same breath sticks the elbows in on the journalists who had hounded him earlier. Other instances elsewhere.
It was helpful, though, in remembering that hate-reading serves no useful purpose ever, other than unearned superiority. And I managed to keep myself engaged enough to think about what in the book didn’t work, and what did.
(If you didn’t need to know, it didn’t matter - so long as you remembered to remember your place.)
This book belongs to this trend, which marks it out as a bit out of time. For what it’s worth, it’s not a bad book. Some parts are thoughtful, insightful, entertaining, and quite sharp. But other parts are overblown and flabby, untested and as such often unformed.
(Following my theory further. We don’t have ‘diversity’ today. At best, a changing of the guards. In a while, a new order will emerge, the cards shuffled but the basic understanding the same. Why does this matter? Because publishing, as a whole, was dominated by creators, producers, and gatekeepers from a very slender skein. Editors, publishers, writers and reviewers all subscribed to the same basic understandings of how the world worked/ought to work, and rarely paused to question why it worked thus.)
This book is about a collection of characters who, for one reason or another but generally tied to an underlying eccentricity, chose to remove themselves from the social pedestal they once occupied, or could have been expected to occupy. The keys here are two. ‘Social’ reflects the trend I mentioned above. Which is fine, because it says a fair interesting bit about this world. But is not because it mistakes quotidian oddities for matters of inherent profundity. The second is that the author doesn’t interrogate himself as much as he should, given that his perambulations are the core of this shortish book.
His obsession with Bapsy, an erratic social climber is too long and too woolly to truly engage - although a short meditation on relationships, near the end, is thoughtful. An essay about the presumed model for Sebastian Flyte becomes a very sharp essay about the Evelyn Waugh’s determined pursuit of social privilege...
Actually, an unstated linkage of people and things seeking - with varying degrees of success - to bridge the gap between being up there and embedded in the hoi polloi. With our author, as arbiter, naturally being a part of the former.
His peregrinations just aren’t enough to sustain the conceit - and more to the point actually belong in the world he seeks to critique. And this isn’t the only lapse that author doesn’t see, editor doesn’t recognise, and tastemakers don’t question. (The book has a PEN award for memoir. Not being sniffy when I say that it must have been a thin year). He harasses the proto-Sebastian Flyte, and in much the same breath sticks the elbows in on the journalists who had hounded him earlier. Other instances elsewhere.
It was helpful, though, in remembering that hate-reading serves no useful purpose ever, other than unearned superiority. And I managed to keep myself engaged enough to think about what in the book didn’t work, and what did.
April 15, 2014
I'd never heard of Fallowell until this book crossed my desk. Now I'm a huge fan and looking for all and any of his books to read. This is an engaging and actually at times quite funny and then sad and then funny again book about particularly 20th Century and British (or Commonwealth) characters that the author became interested in and eventually tracked down. Probably the selling point is his long piece "Who Was Alistair Graham" about the man who was the inspiration and model for Evelyn Waugh's great charmer Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead Revisited. So all Waugh fans must read this. But my actual favorite here is "The Curious Case of Bapsy Favry" about a Subcontinental social climber who makes Thackeray's characters look like lazy parvenus. And I particularly love how Fallowell gets onto her case via a published obituary he can never again locate -- while she is still alive! The subtitle of the book is "A Memoir for Misfits" and it is that and much more!a
November 26, 2013
What a damned quirky book this was indeed! Part travel narrative regarding the author's experiences in the places he visits, as well as compelling cases as to why he should devote himself to following the trail of these largely obscure figures. The "Brideshead" section was a bit long for me, though I could see his enthusiasm for the later breakthrough in details. Diana's story never really interested my much (see also: O. J. Simpson), but I suppose he felt it a noteworthy ending.
April 12, 2018
One of the things I most appreciate about British writers is how they frequently refer to other writers in their books, leading one from one delight to the next. Alan Bennett recommended "How to disappear" in his "Keep on keeping on" and I am so glad that I made note of it. Fallowell's book is hard to categorize: part travel writing, part memoir, and part biography. Its stories are unexpected and the writing completely delightful. I will definitely re-read it soon!
January 7, 2019
Great book of a few experience Duncan has had with misfits of society, living and dead, that piqued his curiosity. I love his endurance to seek what is both magical and mysterious, damaged and sexual, frightened yet obsessed.
May 9, 2019
The epitome of louche.
September 29, 2024
A good size - fits in the hand nicely.
An entertaining and informative read.
An entertaining and informative read.
January 18, 2013
First published on Madame Arcati blog:
July 19, 2012: News - Duncan Fallowell wins PEN/Ackerley Prize for Memoir for How to Disappear.
Is Duncan Fallowell’s seventh book How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits his actual life story? True, he confesses on p236 to an impressive 40 ‘sexual partners’ in the month following Princess Diana’s death, ‘including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton.’ And certainly he liberally seeds us with tantalising glimpses of private multi-generational Duncan, including the nosey little boy whose first instinct was always to boldly go and duff up any mystery. But be clear: this is no autobiography.
It is instead something much more… typical. It is, for the dorky genre-spotters, a mongrel private parts book - ‘part memoir, part travelogue, part biography,’ to quote his unusually accurate latest publisher Ditto Press. In other words, How To Disappear is not unlike, in form and style, his other classic private parts books To Noto, St Petersburg, ‘New Zealand’ (Going As Far As I Can): each a brilliant self-portrait of the feral Duncan Fallowell on location, as spotted in the looking glass of adored or maligned travelled nation.
Is he then a narcissist whose World Atlas serves exclusively as his mirror? Well, I’ll come back to that.
Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves. There’s the business of the cryptic title: How To Disappear. The early dread threat of a self-help book from California soon gives way to compelling true-life stories of strangeness: each of the four of the five long pieces comprising this book cradles a social Houdini, a personality once great or associated with greatness, who has performed a public disappearing act and now lurks shyly in the shadows awaiting (willing or unwilling) rediscovery by Fallowell.
Will force be necessary to open up these exotic clams? These misfits? Part of the joy of this book lies in wondering whether.
There’s reclusive Alastair Graham who was Evelyn Waugh’s ex-boyfriend; and the elusive social climber Bapsy Pavry (aka Lady Winchester); not forgetting the absent Maruma who bought the alcoholic Isle of Eigg; and who could forget dead Diana? DF himself ‘disappears’ in ‘Sailing To Gozo’ where a ubiquitous, faintly menacing stranger haunts Fallowell’s way on a quaint island yester-world.
Like the little boy he once was, DF the man is first drawn to mystery or it is drawn to him. Not any mystery, mind. The mystery is usually well-connected and/or old world glamorama. And if his overriding instinct is to dispel mystery then his fix is to be found in the tricky process of unravelling it.
Take the case of Alastair Graham, for example. Fallowell first chances on the old dipso in a pub in New Quay and only later discovers who he is (or was) precisely. Sherlock Holmes himself would be impressed by the lengths to which Fallowell goes to track down witnesses for enlightening demystification: awe-inspiring. In the case of poor old Bapsy, who spent her life in posh hotels hustling for royal party invitations, Fallowell’s decades-long quest begins with the discovery of her potted bio in a book in India: he’s hooked by her sad eyes in the accompanying photo, he must meet her!
Fallowell’s dazzling analyses and asides (the book could be subtitled, But I Digress…) do not spare his own primal motivation: ghosts of a sort, such as the subjects of his book, absorb him. He is drawn to ‘the disquieting state in which someone is neither present in one’s life nor absent from it.’ He is the ghostbuster in the ‘abyss which can open up between being here and not being here.’ In his Bapsy piece, the spectre metaphor is bettered by reality when Fallowell has what could be an actual supernatural experience. He remains agnostic on what it is; but to risk ridicule from literary followers of the atheistic faith by writing about it at all is most admirable.
Fallowell’s ghosts come in all shapes and sizes and dead places sometimes tickle his inner Madame Arcati. He adores Pompeii as a zombified still of disinterred pagan sexuality while sluttish ever-dying Venice is subject to such a fantastic Fallowell flogging (a ‘desexed city’) that doges in the Roman Catholic hell must be planning revenge should he ever convert.
As ever, Fallowell seduces with an electric prose style which straddles knowledge high and street like a whore plugged in to a well-stocked Kindle. Why else would I want to read about some sad old snob like Bapsy but to relish the vervy manner in which he compassionately grants what eluded her in life: the right kind of attention. Pathetic she may have been but Fallowell’s mockery is only very faint: he observes the human constant in her, the disappointment that urged her pointless epic life.
Certainly no narcissist (to return to my question above) ever spent as much time preoccupied with how others tick as Fallowell. Beautifully packaged in art-worked hardback, How To Disappear is a beyond-fabulous wallowing in weird people in wonderful places - magical and mesmerising. Oh, and very gossipy, too.
July 19, 2012: News - Duncan Fallowell wins PEN/Ackerley Prize for Memoir for How to Disappear.
Is Duncan Fallowell’s seventh book How To Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits his actual life story? True, he confesses on p236 to an impressive 40 ‘sexual partners’ in the month following Princess Diana’s death, ‘including a group of women in a naturist Jacuzzi in Brighton.’ And certainly he liberally seeds us with tantalising glimpses of private multi-generational Duncan, including the nosey little boy whose first instinct was always to boldly go and duff up any mystery. But be clear: this is no autobiography.
It is instead something much more… typical. It is, for the dorky genre-spotters, a mongrel private parts book - ‘part memoir, part travelogue, part biography,’ to quote his unusually accurate latest publisher Ditto Press. In other words, How To Disappear is not unlike, in form and style, his other classic private parts books To Noto, St Petersburg, ‘New Zealand’ (Going As Far As I Can): each a brilliant self-portrait of the feral Duncan Fallowell on location, as spotted in the looking glass of adored or maligned travelled nation.
Is he then a narcissist whose World Atlas serves exclusively as his mirror? Well, I’ll come back to that.
Let’s just not get ahead of ourselves. There’s the business of the cryptic title: How To Disappear. The early dread threat of a self-help book from California soon gives way to compelling true-life stories of strangeness: each of the four of the five long pieces comprising this book cradles a social Houdini, a personality once great or associated with greatness, who has performed a public disappearing act and now lurks shyly in the shadows awaiting (willing or unwilling) rediscovery by Fallowell.
Will force be necessary to open up these exotic clams? These misfits? Part of the joy of this book lies in wondering whether.
There’s reclusive Alastair Graham who was Evelyn Waugh’s ex-boyfriend; and the elusive social climber Bapsy Pavry (aka Lady Winchester); not forgetting the absent Maruma who bought the alcoholic Isle of Eigg; and who could forget dead Diana? DF himself ‘disappears’ in ‘Sailing To Gozo’ where a ubiquitous, faintly menacing stranger haunts Fallowell’s way on a quaint island yester-world.
Like the little boy he once was, DF the man is first drawn to mystery or it is drawn to him. Not any mystery, mind. The mystery is usually well-connected and/or old world glamorama. And if his overriding instinct is to dispel mystery then his fix is to be found in the tricky process of unravelling it.
Take the case of Alastair Graham, for example. Fallowell first chances on the old dipso in a pub in New Quay and only later discovers who he is (or was) precisely. Sherlock Holmes himself would be impressed by the lengths to which Fallowell goes to track down witnesses for enlightening demystification: awe-inspiring. In the case of poor old Bapsy, who spent her life in posh hotels hustling for royal party invitations, Fallowell’s decades-long quest begins with the discovery of her potted bio in a book in India: he’s hooked by her sad eyes in the accompanying photo, he must meet her!
Fallowell’s dazzling analyses and asides (the book could be subtitled, But I Digress…) do not spare his own primal motivation: ghosts of a sort, such as the subjects of his book, absorb him. He is drawn to ‘the disquieting state in which someone is neither present in one’s life nor absent from it.’ He is the ghostbuster in the ‘abyss which can open up between being here and not being here.’ In his Bapsy piece, the spectre metaphor is bettered by reality when Fallowell has what could be an actual supernatural experience. He remains agnostic on what it is; but to risk ridicule from literary followers of the atheistic faith by writing about it at all is most admirable.
Fallowell’s ghosts come in all shapes and sizes and dead places sometimes tickle his inner Madame Arcati. He adores Pompeii as a zombified still of disinterred pagan sexuality while sluttish ever-dying Venice is subject to such a fantastic Fallowell flogging (a ‘desexed city’) that doges in the Roman Catholic hell must be planning revenge should he ever convert.
As ever, Fallowell seduces with an electric prose style which straddles knowledge high and street like a whore plugged in to a well-stocked Kindle. Why else would I want to read about some sad old snob like Bapsy but to relish the vervy manner in which he compassionately grants what eluded her in life: the right kind of attention. Pathetic she may have been but Fallowell’s mockery is only very faint: he observes the human constant in her, the disappointment that urged her pointless epic life.
Certainly no narcissist (to return to my question above) ever spent as much time preoccupied with how others tick as Fallowell. Beautifully packaged in art-worked hardback, How To Disappear is a beyond-fabulous wallowing in weird people in wonderful places - magical and mesmerising. Oh, and very gossipy, too.
December 19, 2017
This is an extremely interesting book. There are so many snippets of information and gossip which can lead you into many directions of future reading. I love Duncan Fallowell’s style which is refreshingly shocking at times and very descriptive of places and people. I’m sorry to have finished it.
I have just bought a book on Kindle as a result of reading this book. Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw. My next book to read.
I have just bought a book on Kindle as a result of reading this book. Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman by Minoo Dinshaw. My next book to read.
March 13, 2018
First off: Where to shelve this one? Memoir? Travel? Not sure. Yes, it's about particular places and times but somewhat like Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, it's not so much about the place itself as how being there affects the traveler telling the tale. "The crucial factor in all adventures is the gift. Something coming at you unannounced, unscheduled, free of charge, impossible to refuse." Fallowell cannot abide being "herded"; he seeks experiences. He is fascinated by people who "disappear" -- or never show up at all. The anticipation, the hunt may trump the actual discovery and it's best if some mystery remains. He pays scant attention to local "attractions" and he's easily distracted by his own musings about people or places he may never have encountered at all. His frequent and rambling digressions may trouble some readers but I soon became accustomed to them and was rewarded with some unforeseen insights. e.g. his exploration of how transporting an everyday object from an archaeological site to a museum transforms it from a functional item into an object of contemplation, representing far more than its original purpose, becoming a talisman of its origin. Fallowell's pursuit of unique and often elusive personalities lends a gossipy yet amusing flavor: Bapsy Pavry, surely the queen of all social climbers; Evelyn Waugh's reclusive former gay lover; the self-proclaimed artist "Maruma" who for reasons unknown, acquires an entire inhabited island.
My immediate quibble is with the trashy cover which entirely fails to do the book justice; unaware of the contents, I would never have considered picking it up. I'm glad I did.
My immediate quibble is with the trashy cover which entirely fails to do the book justice; unaware of the contents, I would never have considered picking it up. I'm glad I did.
August 19, 2014
P. 183 reads:
"At the root of Western literature is The Iliad which is about leaving one's home to go out into the world and realise oneself in the battle of life. Only after, as a sequel, comes The Odyssey, the attempt to return, the wandering search for home once again - and hoping to recognise it when you find it. These great seminal books told us long ago: expect to be surprised by the human adventure, expect to be hurt, expect to be moved, upset, mirthful, angry; and give love, find love."
"At the root of Western literature is The Iliad which is about leaving one's home to go out into the world and realise oneself in the battle of life. Only after, as a sequel, comes The Odyssey, the attempt to return, the wandering search for home once again - and hoping to recognise it when you find it. These great seminal books told us long ago: expect to be surprised by the human adventure, expect to be hurt, expect to be moved, upset, mirthful, angry; and give love, find love."
July 8, 2016
Out of the way, dusty corners of literary history relentlessly tracked down and picked over with forensic charm while linked to lively topography make this book difficult to put down. One reaches the end but in truth one would like these tales to go on forever - or at least for a very long time.
October 31, 2014
Wonderful and quirky - I inhaled it over a weekend.
November 30, 2016
Found the hippy trail and Alistair Graham (loosely Sebastian Flyte) material very interesting and enjoyable.. the Diana section less so.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews