Observer Reappraisal: Auto Da Fay By Fay Weldon Essay, Research Paper

Fay and fortuneAuto district attorney FayFay WeldonFlamingo? 15.99, pp366When Fay Weldon leaves St Andrews with an MA in economic sciences and psychological science, she takes her vermilion university gown with her: it comes in utile subsequently, she says, as a Father Christmas outfit, before moths claim it. The vermilion gown is perfect Weldon attire & # 8211 ; it sums up the tease personality behind her autobiography, Auto da Fay. How much of what she writes is thoughtful and educated & # 8211 ; how much a gay parody? The delectation of Fay Weldon is that one can rarely be perfectly certain if she is serious. She has ever been anarchically cagey, amusing, fearless, a one-woman-show. As a kid, she was the Cheerful Person in her household. When her sister took up with an unsuitable adult male, her female parent leant on Fay. & # 8216 ; To be cheerful was my recognized function around this clip, and come to believe of it, ever has been and still is. & # 8217 ; ( She is full of reconsideration. ) Weldon doesn & # 8217 ; t allow the reader down any more than she did her female parent in this frustrating, steeping, lazily entertaining autobiography. It is the kind of book stuffed full of things that you hope are made up but fright are true. I flinched at her description of the manner frogs were one time used in pregnancy-tests and can non ostracize the description of the chef in a hotel where Weldon worked who used to blow his olfactory organ into the whipped pick when angry.But Auto district attorney Fay begins before the beginning, in the uterus, in New Zealand. When her female parent was pregnant with Fay, they survived an temblor ( might this explicate Fay & # 8217 ; s digesting gustatory sensation for play? Her first short narrative was set in Pompeii ) . The New Zealand of childhood is sketchily remembered: the & # 8216 ; animating & # 8217 ; bars seem to hold hung on most vividly in the head, the friendly relationships 2nd, the landscape 3rd. Weldon & # 8217 ; s female parent and grandma were English: & # 8216 ; Bohemian & # 8217 ; literary, musical, delicate & # 8211 ; non obvious campaigners for robust antipodal life. Her male parent was a charming physician who liked the heat ( or generated it in others, particularly adult females ) .The book & # 8217 ; s construction is slovenly, as if rambling at velocity and the text itself seems unedited. But repeats are stating: Weldon confesses ( several times ) that she does non like watching horror films at place ( the Satan must non be invited in ) , she tells us ( twice ) about her jilted advertisement motto: & # 8216 ; Vodka makes you drunker quicker & # 8217 ; ( alluring to reiterate that one, I can see ) ; and she boasts three times that her grandma, Nona, lived to 99 ( this greatly entreaties to her ) .It would be surprising if

it didn’t. The amazing thing about this book is the degree to which Weldon believes family history repeats itself. Life is a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Hand-me-downs rule. We are no more than our ancestors’ cast-offs. Her belief in patterns is superstitious: ‘the lost wedding ring turns up on the day of the divorce; the person you sit next to on the Tube happens to be your new boss.’ She has seen ghosts, of course.If this were a conversation and not a book, one would want to keep interrupting to ask more about what she felt, more about what her family was actually like. For someone so garrulous she is emotionally guarded, admitting – tantalisingly – that she prefers to look outside herself. The exception to this is her outburst of grief over the death of her friend, Flora. And, at one point, over 100 pages in, without warning (everything she does is without warning) she grumbles furiously, as if it is all the reader’s fault, that she is not finding writing her autobiography therapeutic.She solves the problem by writing as if her life were fiction. She describes engagingly the romance of living in a houseboat on the Thames as she did for a while and the feckless charms of the father of her first child. She resorts to the third person to relive her marriage to a schoolteacher, Mr Bateman, whom she married out of miserable expediency (for her son’s sake). Mr Bateman sounds like a figment of her imagination, a bad dream. He acted as a nervous pimp, guilty about his sexual non-performance, finding her other partners. She grew fat and became source material for her first novel The Fat Woman’s Joke. Narrative, for Weldon, has always been a cure.The autobiography ends as her writing career begins. I was left musing over an unacknowledged pattern in her life that is too strange – and revealing – to ignore. It is to do with her tendency to look down (rather than back), her interest in what goes on at ankle level and below. She describes her father walking off down a beach, abandoning her family for good. This leads on to a description of a chained magpie who pecked her ankles. When she has a crush at school, it is the girl’s pixie-ish footwear, not her face, that enraptures her. Anxiety is like a fox that ’snapped at her heels’ and babies, she warns, grow into children who ‘run around your ankles and bite you’.Ron Weldon (to whom she was married for 31 years) may be responsible. On their first date, he told her to ‘keep looking at the ground’ as you never knew what you might find. He then conjured a ?5 note from the gutter.