First published 2024
Michael Frayn sits down to catalog the people who have marked his nine decades of life. He wants to capture these relationships before his memory abandons him entirely. Some friends transformed him completely. Others barely left a trace. He writes about companions readers might recognize and others so obscure that even Frayn himself barely knew them. The stories reveal unexpected loves and forgotten tragedies. Not all of Frayn's relationships involved other humans. He examines his lifelong partnership with his own aging body as it carries him toward his ninetieth year. He considers the peculiar friendship he has maintained with storytelling itself. This patchwork memoir weaves together encounters from across a literary lifetime. Frayn approaches each relationship with equal measures of affection and clear-eyed honesty. He mourns what time has taken while celebrating what endures. The book becomes both a tribute to human connection and an invitation for readers to meet one of literature's most perceptive observers.
Genres: literary-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: memoir, reflective
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
272 pages · Paperback · Faber & Faber