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A Life of My Own

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A Life of My Own

By: Claire Tomalin
Narrated by: Penelope Wilton
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Summary

Penguin presents A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin, read by Dame Penelope Wilton.


As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life.

This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin. When he was killed on assignment as a war correspondent she was left to bring up their four children - and at the same time make her own career.

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Critic reviews

Tomalin knows how to tell a cracking story
A book that radiates intelligence, wit and insight
Tomalin is the nimblest of narrators
Claire Tomalin is the finest and most disinterested of biographers, because in her pages she has given Jane Austen her liberty (Hilary Mantel on 'Jane Austen')
Superb (Nick Hornby on 'Charles Dickens')
Tomalin is a most intelligent and sympathetic biographer... She writes well and wittily
All stars
Most relevant
An amazing life story.
A life full of energy and hard work resulting in an incredible achievement.
So admirable except for the unfortunate amount of name dropping and self aggrandising. Although probably well deserved.
Also rather coy about her own life whilst being very outspoken about others.

Anonymous

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A clear, fluent reading of Tomalin’s work, which I found to be moving and instructive.

Excellent

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It was a privilege to listen to this. I was struck by Ms Tomalin’s strength and intellect. A fascinating account of her interesting life. I loved it.

Fascinating

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Claire Tomalin’s strengths apparently come in industrial strength: a childhood steeped in culture (and parental disunity); a hugely developed intellect (her Cambridge First was inevitable); decades of success at a catalogue of high profile roles in literary journalism and editing; enormous energy and a capacity for prodigious and relentless hard work; five highly respected biographies (including Pepys & Mary Wollstonecraft)… And so it goes on.

These intellectual strengths have perhaps given her the dignified resilience in the face of tragedy. The death of her serially unfaithful husband Nicholas Tomalin when she was 40; the heart-breaking suicide of her exceptionally gifted golden daughter Susanna at the age of 22; a baby boy dead at 3 weeks (the coldest thing she’s ever touched); her only son disabled by spina bifida – just one of these would utterly destroy most of us. She describes the tragedies with elegance and not a shred of self-pity and her restrained treatment of bearing grief is extraordinarily moving.

But she does not want to be defined by these misfortunes. Work is her life-blood (‘Work Work Work’ is what drives her) and as she moves through her immensely successful career, her litany of friends and colleagues (and the frequent lists can be rather tedious) sounds like a Who’s Who of the literary world, sprung in large part from the inter-related network of high-flying Oxbridge graduates. But these names recreate the literary times.

Tomalin looks back on a working life spanning more than sixty years with all its social changes. That is interesting in itself, but her personal story (as in her biographies) makes the whole hugely involving. The story of her father coming to England and of the ultimately tragic marriage between him and Tomalin’s talented musician-composer mother would make a brilliant biography by itself. At 84 Tomalin says she’ll be beginning another book as soon as she’s finished this one. I’m sure she will – and I look forward to her finishing it.

Penelope Wilton is a highly appropriate reader with her perfect English voice, but I would have like a bit more vigour, a quality I imagine Tomalin possesses in spadefuls. The narration didn't need spadefuls, but just a little more vigour and variation.

Her autobiography as good as her biographies

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I enjoyed this autobiography of Claire Tomalin, herself a biographer of other fascinating people. So interesting to hear about her rich life and her family.

Fascinating autobiography

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