Meeting the Devil: A Book of memoir by London Review of Books and Alan Bennet (Windmill, £12.99)
A volume of autobiography taken from the pages of the London Review of Books, this is a glimpse inside the lives of bookish people. It couldn’t be more varied. Andrew O’Hagan tells us about his Glasgow childhood: “Over time, we started to hit the boy hard.” RW Johnson tells us about cutting his foot in a lagoon, and then having a large part of his leg amputated. Emily Witt writes one of the best things ever about online dating. Then there is the old lady who lived in a van in Alan Bennett’s garden for more than a decade. It is odder than you think at first, as the fine details emerge, but a lovely story.
My Autobiography by Alex Ferguson (Hodder, £8.99)
My goodness, this is absorbing. Why is it so fascinating? Partly because it’s a book about how a successful person thinks and operates. Partly also because we know many of the other people involved — David Beckham, Eric Cantona, Roy Keane. Ferguson tells us about deciding to retire in 2002 and then reversing his decision. He tells us about how he manages a large organisation. There is the run-in with Beckham in the dressing room: “I moved towards him, and as I approached I kicked a boot.” There is the argument with Roy Keane: “His eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads.”
Report From the Interior by Paul Auster (Faber, £10.99)
Paul Auster, the American novelist, recently wrote an autobiography based on his body, and how it had fared over the decades. This is a sort of sequel, about his mind when he was young. He points out, early on, that what appear to be memories of early childhood might be something slightly different: “Perhaps you are not remembering at all, or remembering only a later remembrance of what you think you thought in that distant time which is all but lost to you now.” He is fascinated by the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man. And he memorably captures his state of mind in his twenties: a mixture of hope and despair.
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