IT’S GETTING REAL
NEED A GREAT NON-FICTION BOOK TO GIFT (OR SELF-GIFT) THIS CHRISTMAS? CLAIRE ALLFREE SELECTS THE BEST FROM POLITICS AND CELEBRITY BIOGRAPHIES TO PAST AND PRESENT FEMINISM
DIARY OF AN MP’S WIFE
by Sasha Swire
(Little, Brown)
David Cameron has much to regret but high on his list must be his friendship with the Swires. There’s a sweatinducing indiscretion on almost every page of Sasha’s entertainingly vicious account of the ‘chumocracy’ at the heart of the Cameron government, to which she, as wife of then MP Hugo, had intimate access for years. If only she could worm her way back in for a sequel…
TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH
by Mary Trump
(Simon and Schuster)
Of all the many jaw-dropping accounts of the President Donald Trump era, this memoir from his niece, Mary, offers perhaps the most insightful analysis of the man. Her book provides a context for her uncle’s monstrous narcissism without letting him off the hook. The essential explainer of a man who is essentially inexplicable.
THE MEANING OF MARIAH CAREY
by Mariah Carey (Macmillan)
We may well associate singer Mariah Carey with demands for red carpets lined with white candles when arriving at hotels as much as we do with her blinding voice but there’s more to the ultimate pop diva than her absurd lifestyle. In this frank memoir she details a hard life shaped by abuse, ‘colourism’, ex-husbands and siblings who treated her like an ‘ATM machine’.
BROKEN GREEK by Pete Paphides (Quercus)
Many musos are snobs but not Pete Paphides. He writes just as lovingly about the Wombles and Abba as he does David Bowie in this beautifully written memoir of the way music helped him negotiate a 1970s childhood with immigrant parents who spent every available hour working in chip shops. Anyone who has felt the power of pop explain their life to them will love this.
JUST IGNORE HIM
by Alan Davies
(Little, Brown)
Alan Davies is one of the most likeable comedians on TV. There’s not much of his amiable humour in this, his second memoir, though. Instead, he lays bare a childhood shaped by the early death of his mother and the abusive behaviour of his father, whom Davies would many years later discover harboured images of young boys in his wardrobe. Not an easy read.
MORE THAN A WOMAN
by Caitlin Moran (Ebury)
Ageing parents? Sulky teenagers? Scheduled marital sex? There are now a million books on the everyday reality of being the female head of a household but Moran is better than almost anyone else at making you splurt with laughter. Aimed at women in their forties, this is the follow-up to her feminist handbook Just Like A Woman and it’s just as readable, galvanising, witty and true.
A PROMISED LAND
by Barack Obama (Viking)
The political account of Britain in 2020 has yet to be written and no, we don’t think Tom Bower’s indulgent biography of Prime Minister Boris Johnson counts. For the book of the year on what it means to be the US president and the leader of the free world, only Barack Obama’s restlessly self-questioning account of his first presidential term, beginning in 2009, will do.
HUNGOVER GAMES
by Sophie Heawood
( Jonathan Cape)
There are many books written about women struggling to have a child, rather less of them about finding yourself single and pregnant in your mid-thirties, and not exactly on cloud nine about it. Sophie Heawood busts many of the smug mum myths in this funny account of going it alone with a baby, a journey that takes her from wild nights in Hollywood to grotty ones in London.
MOTHERWELL
by Deborah Orr (Weidenfeld and Nicolson) The limitations of workingclass Thatcherite aspiration are explored with love and frustration in this memoir from the late Guardian journalist Deborah Orr, who grew up in the shadow of the Ravenscraig steelworks near Motherwell. An excellent account of post-industrial Scotland, a candid portrait of her parents and, poignantly, a picture of a young girl trying to break free.
DIFFICULT WOMEN
by Helen Lewis
( Jonathan Cape)
Subtitled A History Of Feminism In 11 Fights, Helen Lewis’s account of feminism through the lives of 11 ‘difficult women’ is a useful and very readable primer. Not only that but she is rigorously attentive to the fact that to be female is to be as multifaceted, complicated and contradictory as any man. You’d think this wouldn’t need saying but it does.