Right, so. No secret at all that I am entirely in love with Hercule Poirot (and to a lesser extent, Miss Marple), and now it appears that I am in love with Agatha Christie herself! The book is written in a very engaging and chatty style and it's hard not to be charmed by Christie. In fact, I now want to be her, write full time and own umpteen big houses, and perhaps travel a great deal between the First and Second World War in the Middle East.
The book is a fairly straight chronological record of her time up until the point of her writing, with some tangential investigations into age and ageing, and periodic, out-of-chronology anecdotes that illustrate a character trait. She talks about her early years as a girl of a particular class in a particular part of England, the process of being brought up and out, and her very vague educational experiences. She talks about her "season" and for the first time in my life I could kind of see the fun of it - it always seems tedious beyond belief in books by Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford (which I think covers a fairly wide spectrum in terms of opinion?). Biographists couldn't make "coming out" and "seasons" seem
less exciting than Austen and Mitford. But Christie makes it seem rather fun in a gentle way. Also, apparently Edwardian men were quite pathological when it came to proposing and were inclined to ask people to marry them on a mere whim. I quite enjoyed the description of life at the time - a good descriptive primary document (Ginger puts her historian's hat on).
There is no mention in the autobiography of the famous "
disappearance", which is quite understandable - she briefly sketches what was happening in her life about that time, and suffice to say, her first husband Archie was an
asshole. Check this out: her mother dies, she travels to the family home to clean through the lifetime possessions of her mother and grandmother, and he tells her (as she spirals into a nervous breakdown) that he "doesn't like sadness or illness" so he picks up with someone else in London and decides to divorce Our Agatha (in her hour of need, no less). And
then, when he announces his intention to divorce her, he kind of implies that
it's all her fault (at least, that was the impression that I got). Darlings, I was revolted and totally het up. I hope that when this book was published in 1965 that a bunch of people got together and egged the fuck out of his house.
Christie writes about Hercule Poirot (the invention thereof), and while she doesn't pan him outright it seems pretty apparent that she's not terribly enthused by the role that he continued to play in her life. At the time she invented him, it was merely because she needed someone,
anyone, to play the part of the detective in a story she was writing and he seemed like a pretty good bet. She started writing
The Mysterious Affair at Styles as some kind of alternative to needlework, as she puts it, and there she was! Lumped with Poirot, who was elderly from the first, and couldn't be knocked off until
Curtain (which is an excellent book, FYI).
As a Poirot addict, it seemed pretty apparent to me that Christie caricatures herself when writing the character of Ariadne Oliver. Like Christie notes of herself in her autobiography, Ariadne Oliver hates parties and literary luncheons, loves apples and lives in despair over having her plays badly adapted (Christie notes experiencing the same emotions during the first adaptation of one of her books (
Alibi) as Ariadne does in
Mrs McGinty is Dead)
. And knowing this parallel and having rather an affection for the character of Ariadne, results in a warm and fuzzy sort of feeling. It makes me feel as though I could
know Christie, a dreadful falsehood of course, but nonetheless... there I am.
Knowing Agatha. Sort of.
And thus ends my entirely subjective review of
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography.
In conclusion: fabulous book, you should totally go out, find it, and read it.
And also, Jo: if you're reading this, THANKS SO MUCH FOR THE LEND! What a champ.
