Experience: A Memoir - Softcover

"Fuses humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth." --Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Hums with the same antic prose and looping comic riffs that characterize Amis' fiction.... [Amis is] a splendid writer." --Time

"With its recurrent themes and nimble shifts from one period to another, Experience is well made and ingeniously stitched together. It's also extremely well written." --The Globe and Mail

"[Experience is] a sublime essay giving shape and meaning to [Amis's] chaotic life.... Experience is an unexpectedly emotional odyssey. Experience is a novelist's memoir in which events are cunningly cross-threaded and intercut like a plot." --National Post, May 18, 2000 (profile)

"Like only a handful of other literary memoirs, Experience is more than the mere facts of the author's life collected in neat chronological order. Experience succeeds where most other memoirs fail because it's really a superbly written novel -- starring Martin Amis as its amusingly self-deprecating central protagonist, his crotchety but ultimately loveable father and fellow novelist, Kingsley Amis, as his foil, and with the difficulties and joys of family life firmly in place as its central theme.... Experience is a long, wise poem in typically ebullient Amis prose in praise of all that endures: creativity, friendship and love. Most novels should be so richly fulfilling." --The Toronto Star

"What mustn't get lost is that the rest can be wonderfully, wryly funny. Adolescent torpor is sleepily reimagined." --The Hamilton Spectator

"Striking and satisfying. It's an edgy and electrifying read. [Amis's world is] a wonderful place of privilege, celebrity and intellectual intrigue on the one hand, and a dark, woeful realm of emotional tragedy, physical pain and public persecution of the other." --NOW Magazine

"His unflinching portrayal of his fraught but ultimately loving relationship with the father gives Experience a dimension that the Martin Amis oeuvre, for all its acid brilliance, has too often lacked. This is a compassionate book, and a very moving one.... He ends up with a book that's true to the way memory really works-obsessive, elliptical, incomplete, maddeningly non-linear, but deeply revealing." --Calgary Herald and The Gazette (Montreal)

"Rather than focus extensively on the literary high life, Martin Amis uses his formidable skills to dissect the more troubling aspects of a life very much in progress. The result is an unusually skillful and unconventional memoir with the tension and release of great fiction." --Ottawa X Press

"[A] tender, funny...sometimes gut-wrenching memoir.... Fans of the brilliant and eccentric Amises-moral satirist father and satiric misanthropist son-will be amply gratified by the sheer energetic range and depth and human circumstance, of the experience that heaves itself up from these pages.... His book thrills and breaks the heart." --London Free Press

"Rather than focus extensively on the literary high life, Martin Amis uses his formidable skills to dissect the more troubling aspects of a life very much in progress. The result is an unusually skillful and unconventional memoir with the tension and release of great fiction." --Ottawa Free Press

"Those who have marvelled at the wry and unforgiving fiction -- its prose like a strobe light dancing over vistas of urban sleaze and greed -- will likely be taken aback. They may be compelled to tears by a book which is the most touching Amis has written." --Noel Rieder, Hour June 16, 2000

"This memoir engagingly reads like a novel where the literary gifts of the son's sardonic wit, linguistic candour are shown off in the eulogizing of the father, Sir Kingsley Amis, as a womanizer, alcoholic and storyteller whose footsteps Amis traces in his own coming of age as a writer." --The New Brunswick Reader

Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With Experience, he discloses a
private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels. He explores his relationship with his beloved father, novelist Kingsley Amis, and examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Experience also dissects the literary scene, and includes Amis'portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Ian McEwan, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent.