Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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51 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
stephen fry is great!, 3 Jan 2001
This autobiography is of the first twenty years of Stephen's life. I started to read it vaguely knowing that this was the bloke off 'Blackadder' but once I'd finished, I rushed out and bought 'The Liar' and 'The Hippopotamus'. This book is brilliant. It is completely candid about Stephen's depression, homosexuality and school life, among others. It is, however, hilarious all the way through. The reader never feels inferior to Stephen's undoubted intelligence because of the way he mocks himself so easily. By the end of the book, all I wanted to do was go and find him and give him a big hug and tell him everything will be fine! I would definitely recommend this book to anyone and everyone, and also his other books which are all excellent as well.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Witty but brutally honest, 7 Nov 2007
This autobiography may come as something of a surprise for those who see Stephen Fry on the television and imagine that he's always been a sort of friendly uncle/Oscar Wilde hybrid. His early life was certainly troubled - for example, not everyone steals their girlfriend's (sic) father's credit card in order to be able to run away from school - but he writes about his first twenty years with a complete lack of whining or self-pity, and is unafraid to show the reader his own very grave failings.
Fry's wit and candour make this book very difficult to put down - indeed, I ended up reading it one session and, when coming to the end, investigating whether he had written further volumes. Sadly, he hasn't yet, so we'll just have to make do with this little gem for the moment.
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100 of 109 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Book has absolutely blown my Mind, 18 Mar 2007
OK, this book is therapy. Reading it is, and I suspect writing it was too. I started it at 18:00h in the Dublin rush-hour (it's always advisable to have some good reading material at hand in that predicament) and finished it at 05:00h in the morning not even feeling tired, bladder bursting, dehydrated for lack of tea and grinning like a big, happy loon. I then read it all over again, straightaway. It has left me overwhelmed, chastised, wanting to shout out its virtues in Tesco and giddily, exuberantly happy; happy that such excellent language is still being written, that its creator should walk the earth as my contemporary and share his gifts so generously with all of us and, most of all, that he found redemption.
For, make no mistake, this is a redemption story; redemption not in the religious sense but in the sense of a soul coming to terms with itself. Stephen Fry's love for Oscar Wilde is well publicised, so maybe it's no coincidence that this account of his first twenty years reminded me of Wilde's fairy tales, these delicate, heartbreaking, deeply moralistic stories about love, betrayal, redemption and futility. Sometimes he finds himself cast as the Selfish Giant, sometimes as the Nightingale, sometimes as the ugly dwarf from The Birthday of the Infanta, and - might as well make full use of the Wilde connection here - the story about "Matteo" has taught me more about the true meaning of The Love that Dare not Speak its Name than over twenty years of worship at Oscar's throne.
Redemption is ultimately the result of learning to love yourself, and only once you learn to love yourself you can love others (if you don't believe me, look it up in the Bible). It is no wonder, so, that Moab is my Washpot is brimming with love, in the writing, in the feelings it evokes and between the lines. The deep affection for the people around him that is spilling from these pages is what makes even the worst escapades described on them forgivable and makes you want to offer your shoulder to the lying, thieving, betraying 17 year old Stephen to cry on. Where that school boy would have hurt people to hurt himself, 39 year old Stephen, the adult who had forgiven himself, asked them for absolution and received it.
All that said, this is still Stephen Fry we are talking about, so Moab is my Washpot is anything but a soppy hugfest. There are side-splittingly funny anecdotes in this book, deep literary and philosophical insights, acrid rants, pure, hilarious filth, language as beautiful as a white lily next to profanities that would make a sailor blush, fond asides about his colleague, confidante and Alter Ego Hugh Laurie that hint at the essence of their friendship, and everything else that makes Stephen so uniquely Stephen and us so lucky to have him.
Of course there are authors and influences without whom the book wouldn't have been written, or would certainly read very differently. There is a lot of P.G. Wodehouse in the use of simile, the way Stephen Fry displays his view of the world recalls Douglas Adams, and the whole book owes a certain debt to Graham Chapman's A Liar's Autobiography, a must read for everyone who enjoyed it.
Buy this book! Read it! Read it again! Pester libraries to stock it! Shout its virtues from the rooftops and include a copy in the payload of the next space probe to leave the solar system!
Not the full Five Stars, however, as the carthatic atmosphere that pervades this book occasionally - very occasionally that is - threatens to descend to that of a 12 Steps Confessional. Still, as autobiographies go, it is well and truly the dog's bollocks.
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