With the publication of his memoirs, Amis' cherished reputation as the enfant terrible of English letters is under threat. It will not be easy for him to survive his own rehabilitation. Amis, now 50, wants to be remembered primarily for his fiction. The possibility that a factual book, albeit a sublime essay giving shape and meaning to his chaotic life, could eclipse his reputation as a novelist is too dangerous to contemplate. Well-wishers are understandably nervous about how to convey their response to Experience without offending him.
Experience is an unexpectedly emotional odyssey.
The memoir was designed originally to discharge a literary-historical obligation to his father, who died in 1995. The rarity of their case, novelists pere et fils, he thought, demanded it. But Kingsley's death came in the middle of a convulsive decade for Amis - one in which he says he began to feel that he was living in a novel. Lamorna Heath was temporarily separated from her husband, Patrick Seale, when the affair happened. She committed suicide two years later and Delilah was brought up by Seale as his daughter.