What the Grown-ups Were Doing: An Odyssey Through 1950s Suburbia [Hardcover]

'Laced with Michele Hanson's characteristic chutzpah and humanity, What the Grown Ups Were Doing evokes in compelling detail a claustrophobic but defiant suburban childhood of the 1950s'
--David Kynaston, bestselling author of Austerity Britain

'A funny, touching memoir that immerses the reader into 1950s society in an exploration of her Jewishness' --Stylist

'This is a memoir that catches the flavour of the times as felt from within... A tender tale of a young Jewish girl growing into an understanding of her noisy, quarrelsome and passionately alive family' --Joan Bakewell, Observer

`With a twist of wit, Hanson good-naturedly tells it like it awkwardly was in Fifties suburbia for a tentative but tomboyish teenager' --SAGA magazine

'She writes fluently and delightfully about suburban life in the Fifties as if it were yesterday... Beneath the surface, many of the families who seemed averagely dull and conformist were in fact averaging dull and conformist. Some weren't, as What the Grown-ups Were Doing eloquently and hilariously reveals. Often, it transpires, what the grown-ups were doing was each other'
--Sunday Telegraph

'A lovely memoir about growing up in a Jewish family in Ruislip in post-war Britain' --FabAfterFifty.co.uk

'An engaging memoir of her Jewish upbringing. She paints a vivid picture of family life' --Belfast Telegraph

'Fresh, deeply evocative and extremely funny. Michele Hanson's writing has a precision that is to be treasured and a tenderness that makes you want to throw your arms around it... Just lovely. Really charmingly lovely' --James Purefoy, actor

`In this briskly enjoyable portrait of 1950s suburban Jewish childhood, Hanson's mother is a screamer, her father a sulker, and their daughter perpetually ashamed... On the whole, Hanson plays it for laughs, but a seam of darkness runs through the book' --The Lady

Dashes of flavour mark place, as well as time. We visit the seedy Soho of the 1950s, where Hanson s father owned a belt factory and her mother opened the second-ever Soho coffee bar; and where later on, Hanson is horrified by the goings-on at the Heaven and Hell bar on Old Compton Street...The book is filled with the Guardian columnist s trademark warmth and wry humour, despite the ever-present backdrop of the recent war and the difficulties facing Jewish families at that time --Time Out

A view of life in the decade before the Sixties began to swing is provided by Michele Hanson s 'What the Grown-Ups Were Doing' , a wonderful, funny memoir of life in Fifties suburban Britain, a buttoned-up world of hidden passions and resentments --Choice Magazine

Michele Hanson is one of UK's wittiest and most popular columnists whose funny and sensitive pieces on ageing and modern Britain strike a chord with millions of people. Previously, she was a school teacher for 25 years in inner London, and then escaped the chalk-face and began to write weekly columns for the Guardian. Her books have been serialised for radio and made into a BBC cartoon series. Her book 'Living With Mother' won MIND book of the year in 2006. She lives in north London, these days mostly on her own with her dogs.