Memoirs of an Unfit Mother (Hardcover)

Anne Robinson's most recent public persona--the hardened battleaxe of television's The Weakest Link--is but a very small part of this quizmistress; Memoirs Of An Unfit Mother will most likely change your perceptions of the star. This book is a good read, but not a comfortable one. It's interesting: a saga-style across-the-generations tale of the Robinson clan. Of course, as a long-standing journalist before she hit the TV big time, Robinson's written style ensures the pages turn quickly. Memoirs of An Unfit Mother reads like a deposition for the defence of Anne Robinson, by Anne Robinson. It's hard to tell how many prospective readers know much of her life before the consumer TV programme Watchdog, so the author's decision to lay down hard facts about her alcoholism, the demise of a troubled marriage, blind ambition and the subsequent loss of custodial rights to her daughter Emma is risky.

Certainly, there have been hard lessons learnt. Which reader cannot sympathise with the empty dread a mother must feel when a child is taken away? The desperate loneliness? The horror of being judged as a failed parent? Sad things have certainly happened. But Robinson¹s reasoning--that the same would not happen to a hard-drinking workaholic man--only half helps her case for public support. It is difficult to empathise with someone who equates herself with Margaret Thatcher at every turn since the 1970s. Someone who recognises greed as a good point. And someone who seems to take great pride in telling how her husband was derided by colleagues when she became his boss. Readers who remember "Auntie Annie" from Watchdog may be shocked by her--perhaps self-protectively--hardened heart. Those who believe the hype for TV's Mrs Nasty are also mistaken--there aren't many intended wrongs here. Instead, Anne Robinson has laid herself bare, in an appeal to public opinion that she's been wronged by the system. Maybe she has. All in all, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother is worth reading, and worth learning from. It's all down here in black and white, but it is the grey areas in between which hold the intrigue. --Helen Lamont

The astonishing success of her highly unpleasant TV quiz The Weakest Link has had many criticising Anne Robinson and her show as one of the most mean-spirited phenomena on TV today. The truth is, of course, that Robinson is a highly professional TV personality who has identified the current "victim TV" trend and shoe-horned it into the quiz show format. And this is only the latest achievement of a woman who has enjoyed considerable professional success as well as some particularly tough times, as this unflinching autobiography records. Anne Robinson's early success in the media almost ended in her destruction. A doomed marriage was followed by a secret custody battle for her two-year-old daughter Emma. Her tale is both shocking and funny, with an engrossing account of three generations of women: her formidable mother, Anne herself, and her daughter Emma. Many will be particularly intrigued by Robinson's account of her battle with alcoholism and the eventual triumph of returning to take a second stab at making her life work. Robinson is also a highly successful newspaper columnist and the first woman to regularly edit a national newspaper. Watchdog, of course, runs concurrently with The Weakest Link, and her current celebrity will guarantee this book phenomenal sales, in everywhere but Wales.

Anne Robinson is probably best known as the resident dominatrix of television game show The Weakest Link. Her long, difficult and relatively distinguished career as a journalist takes second place to an assumed persona that hides a history of failed relationships, personal pain and loss - and an addiction to alcohol that almost killed her. Growing up a good Catholic girl with a charismatic but domineering mother, Robinson's early career success as a reporter left her unprepared for any kind of failure. A desperately unsuccessful first marriage left her ripe for conversion to hopeless drunk and lost her custody of her two-year-old daughter, Emma. In these days before feminism, the courts seem more concerned about Robinson's career ambition than about her drinking, her solicitor tries to bed her and Emma's care is eventually entrusted to her equally ambitious journalist father. The most affecting part of the book concerns her struggle to drag herself out of addiction, though there is much more to the book than an inspirational real-life tale. Its scope stretches across three generations, from the life of her outrageous powerhouse of a mother, through Robinson's own chequered history, to the blossoming movie industry career of grown-up Emma. It also has much to say on the women's issues that touched upon this lifelong journalist's career - from the rise and fall of Margaret Thatcher to the unhappy marriage and eventual death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Stylistically, the book reads like a newspaper column. Tightly written - sometimes too tightly - its slick journalese is an odd vehicle for confessions of pain and vulnerability and can make the reader feel manipulated into a preordained response. Nevertheless, it's both an absorbing read and an intriguing slice of 20th-century social history. (Kirkus UK)