These two books are memoirs of childhood - growing up they were both book loving, library haunting, intelligent and ambitious to write; both girls grew up to be Guardian columnists and fine journalists.
But their childhood and growing up years could not be more contrasting.
Deborah Orr's Motherwell is eye-wateringly frank about herself, her family, her home and the town she lived in till she could leave it.
Lucy Mangan's Bookworm is the autobiography of a reader whose home life was comfortable, secure and lived in an environment created for flourishing.
Both books prove one of my guiding principles when it comes to reading for both pleasure and profit - biography and autobiography, when written with integrity, and read with the right balance of compassion and criticism, are amongst the most important vehicles for human understanding.
Both books are reading time well spent, but they open very different vistas on how our childhood experiences leave emotional and relational legacies that can either undermine or enhance for the rest of our lives.
Deborah Orr compels the reader to understand from her perspective the long-term emotional damage caused by parents, teachers, playground bullies, toxic male culture, and the sheer guts and risks involved in making decisions that might help you to survive and go on to live your hopes. Lucy Mangan's account of childhood is altogether less painful to read, and tells of how reading itself populates the imagination with hope and confidence to believe that those hopes are possible to achieve.
I think a reading group could well decide to read both books, then talk about what makes for human flourishing in the first years of life, and those so hard to navigate years of growing up and becoming the person we yearn to be, with more, or less success. But whatever we might think personal fulfilment is, in both of these books, two children, two girls, grew into women with careers of their own.
Even then, the differences create stark contrast; Deborah Orr came late in life to feeling she had the freedom, the right and the capacity to be herself and to come to love herself. Lucy Mangan's account of her years says little of the second half of her life, but the allusions tell a story of a family at ease with itself and its place in the world.
Reading these books one after another (I read Bookworm first) was an experience that required a huge swing of the emotional register. It's not that Mangan covers her story in unoffending tones of emulsion; more that Deborah Orr refuses to hide the graffiti that is scrawled across the backdrop of her first twenty years.
This isn't so much a book review of two books, pointing out the merits of the writers, or opting for one or other as the better read. They are both proven writers with a feminist agenda; they tell as honestly as they can what happened to them and how they grew out of their childhood; each is an exercise in the writer's self-understanding, Orr being the more unsparing self-critic, and for that reason the more courageous writer, and the most negatively forceful. You live with constant criticism in the home, you begin to believe the bulletins of your own failure. On the other hand Mangan is equally self-perceptive, except the raw experiential experience she has to work with is much less severe in its ongoing impact into adulthood. Her forte is understanding the importance of the nurtured imagination, the emotionally supported explorer of ideas, and her refusal to settle for professional 'arrival' as a lawyer, choosing instead the freelance writer. I'm glad I read both books.
Apart from anything else reading one after the other confirms what we all know, and what we all require to remember as a moral obligation and an exercise in social understanding; there is no such thing as a level playing field, no way of socially engineering equal opportunity. There is, therefore, no excuse for judging people about the choices they make, until you understand the limits of the choices available, and how those we judge have value added to or subtracted from their lives, by circumstances, people and experiences of which we know nothing.
As a footnote, Deborah Orr died late 2019, just weeks before her memoir was published. It has been featured this week on Radio 4 - you can listen here.
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