Unreliable Memoirs
Clive James was born in Sydney in 1939, and his father died in a plane crash on the way home from a Japanese prison camp shortly after the war. Unreliable Memoirs, the first volume of his autobiography, turns that unpromising start into one of the funniest books ever written about growing up. James writes about his mother, his obsessive friendships, his catastrophic attempts at heroism, his tortured adolescence, and his slow drift toward books and journalism, all in prose that snaps between slapstick and real feeling. The Australian suburbs he describes are specific, and yet the book has traveled everywhere. It has never gone out of print in the UK and is widely quoted as a model of the comic memoir.
What you might want to know about Unreliable Memoirs
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Clive James's classic comic memoir of growing up in postwar Sydney, from fatherless boyhood to disastrous first jobs and first loves.
Yes. Lewis has cited Clive James as one of the writers who shaped his own sense of what nonfiction can do, and he has singled out Unreliable Memoirs as one of the funniest books he has ever read.
James admits to embellishing and rearranging for the sake of the story, and he opens the book by warning the reader as much. The emotional truth, most readers feel, is exact.
Unreliable Memoirs was written by Clive James, published in 1980 by Picador.
Unreliable Memoirs is 176 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Unreliable Memoirs takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Unreliable Memoirs is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
