A Life Of My Own: A Memoir

"Claire Tomalin, an accomplished literary biographer, moves smoothly between “the trivial and the tragic” and deftly braids the personal, professional and historical in this decorous but elegant memoir that is an ode to perseverance. At 85, she traces her not-always-easy path to self-fulfillment — revisiting a childhood marked by the double discontinuities of divorce and war, a tempestuous marriage that ended in widowhood at 40 with four children, and multiple family tragedies, including the loss of a child to depression. Among the book’s charms are Tomalin’s evocation of London’s vibrant literary culture of the 1960s and 1970s, in which she worked as an editor for many years before finding her true vocation as a biographer."