My Family: The Memoir

My Family: The Memoir

by David Baddiel
Publication Date: 04/07/2024

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'Genuinely one of the funniest books I have ever read. I wept with laughter' HADLEY FREEMAN


Baddiel has made true art out of experience … A masterpiece’ SATHNAM SANGHERA


'Laugh out loud funny … The read of the summer' THE SUNDAY TIMES


A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny


On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong.


Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.


My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents.


'Baddiel has done his parents proud’ GUARDIAN


'Such a blisteringly honest book it would set fire to the word "candid" for being too pathetic' CAITLIN MORAN

ISBN:
9780008487621
9780008487621
Category:
Memoirs
Publication Date:
04-07-2024
Language:
English
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
David Baddiel

David Baddiel is an author and comedian. He has written and performed in a series of highly successful TV comedy shows, including The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned.

His debut children’s novel, The Parent Agency, was the bestselling 9-12 debut of 2014 and was hailed by the Guardian as ‘funny, sometimes moving and always engaging.’

The Person Controller is his second novel and it confirms David as a brilliant and original new voice in children’s fiction. He lives in London.

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