Experience

by Martin Amis

Perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation, Martin Amis has been the object of obsessive media scrutiny for much of his career. In this much anticipated memoir, he writes with striking candour about his life and, in the process, gives us a clear view of the "geography of the writer's mind."
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 and was exhumed nearly twenty years later from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most notorious serial murderer.
Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, including a wealth of anecdotes, along with memorable pen-portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, among others.

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

406 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."