AFAReads discussion

What happens when a famous biographer turns the lens on her own life? In the case of Claire Tomalin, you get a book that’s as detailed as a biography and as personal as a memoir. In A Life of My Own (Penguin Books, 2017)—our November AFAReads selection—Tomalin, now 87, looks back on her years as a pioneering writer, an author of seven award-winning biographies—and as a parent. It is a revealing portrait of a lucky, tragic, and accomplished life, one of those great memoirs that reads like fiction.

Navigating a career while raising children can sometimes feel like an impossible task. (And that’s during non-COVID times, too!) I’m fortunate to be raising my children now, an era when women can speak openly about their challenges and dreams. But it was women like Tomalin who helped pave the way.

Tomalin opens with memories of her childhood in London, where she was born in 1933 to a musician mother and a professor father. As the book progresses, she describes her years at Cambridge in the early 1950s, then the pushback she faced as a young female writer. She never wavered, pushing through challenges to eventually work with famous editors in London and later writing acclaimed biographies on Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and other luminaries. But it’s her life beyond work that completely draws you in: a grim first marriage that gave her five beloved children, tragic losses involving those children, evading male advances that would be unthinkable in the #MeToo era, and finding real love at age 60.

As Tomalin told the Telegraph, “I’ve had a life with tragedies in it . . . but I’ve also had extraordinary good luck, happiness and blessings. I don’t think I’ve had a hard life; I’ve had a mixed life.”

I moved to London last year and I’m still getting to know this global city, which feels more foreign than I had expected. By seeing London through her eyes, I’ve grown more excited to explore my new home. London and Cambridge play wonderful background roles in the narrative. For anyone who loves Britain, A Life of My Own is a window into the culture of those cities—London as center of the publishing universe and Cambridge as the aspirational British university experience—during the mid-20th century.

Tomalin is a master of narrative writing, as seen in her best-selling biographies. But the story of her life is just as fascinating as her subjects—if not more.

Thanks for reading along,
Annie Fitzsimmons, AFAR Advisor editor