a] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography ... this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection' Independent A week later Sage died in London as a result of emphysema, from which she had suffered for some years. [9] [3] She left behind the draft of the first part of a work on Plato and Platonism in literature, which, according to her former husband [ who?] in 2001, she had been working on intermittently for many years. [5] The posthumous collection Moments of Truth partly consists of reprinted introductions to classic works. [3] Publications [ edit ] But then, in Like Mother, two novels ago, Diski imagined the story of a woman who decides to bear a child she knows in advance will be literally brainless, a sea of liquid behind the eyes. Compared with that, these ‘empty’ brats in Monkey’s Uncle get off lightly, you could say. A more conventionally playful variation on the theme is the prominence given in the novel’s fantasy landscape to the queenly orang-utan Jenny (named for genus, but also after the author) who has a great deal of dignity, and acts as an able critic of human ‘overcapacity in the brain box’ which may account for our self-destructive goings on. And there is some real fun to be had out of the three men in the boat, the Alice pastiche, and the way it’s played off against the dubiously real world of the early Nineties. The Victorian FitzRoy is done with tact and some patience, in period style. And Charlotte cheats her suicidal destiny after all, by trying wholeheartedly but failing –‘She had tested the definition of her life and found it to be very definite indeed.’ This way honour is satisfied, and she even finds a smidgeon of fellow-feeling for her son, ‘an approximation of warmth’, and hands on to him her symbolic silver spoon, her sole souvenir of her father, a seed pearl the story has invested with magical meanings that are not all sinister. How the options narrow down, in the Diski world. How lavish she is with pain, and how crude sometimes, for all her intelligence and style, in the way she hands out the punishment. The coverage that ‘The Sages’ received in the press on getting their degrees, shows just how extraordinary it was that Lorna should have been married (with a quite grown-up ‘baby’) and have graduated. In a boiling summer, punning headlines (‘It’s all a matter of degrees’ and ‘The Couple Who Are One Degree Over’) in the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail emphasise how far they were outside the norm. The best (or worst) of all of these from the Daily Mail, June 27th, 1964, reads: ‘The only marriage where honours are even…’

It really takes off around the third chapter, when Sage digs out her grandfather's sparse, note-like diary of his first two years as village vicar in Hamner, quoting liberally as she paints a picture of a charismatic, bored young man who doesn't love his wife, and tells the story of his love affairs that shook his marriage and scandalised the village. It is so precariously balance - Sage's love of the grandfather who took her under his wing, whom she loved as an eight year old until he died and left her with a crystalised memory that would never change, and the maniacal, lustful, dishonest and promiscuous figure she finds in the diaries. Sage judges harshly, but she somehow remains on her grandfather's side. Her mother and grandmother are, in some respects, the enemy. Her love for her grandfather reflects her conflicts in personality with them. As the story progresses into sexual awakening, Sage's fate is mirrored in the warnings of her female family members that she is too much like her grandfather. This mixture of regret and bouyant spontaneity is what gives Lorna Sage such a tragi-romantic character, and her story such poignant loveliness. Sage's childhood is recounted in her memoir Bad Blood (2000), which traces her disappointment in a family where warped behaviour passed down from generation to generation. The book won the Whitbread Biography Award on 3 January 2001. [7] [8] Ms. Sage's prose is fabulous! She is an extraordinarily accomplished writer with a wonderful turn of the phrase. Just take this "caressing shapeless moments until they wriggle into life" phrase from the epigraph. Reading this I instantaneously recalled people who had this gift. How many of us, though, would have the talent to describe them in this apparently frivolous yet extremely precise way? A metaphor like that carries more meaning than a faithful and detailed account of real-life behavior. Spending time in a post-war Welsh vicarage with Lorna's lusty vicar grandfather, perpetually sour and angry grandmother, and her ditsy mother----none of whom could manage to lift a broom or to teach Lorna to bathe, apparently---was definitely one of those "Gee, I didn't know people lived like that" experiences. Again....a plus for me Moving out of the vicarage and into "council housing" once her father returned from the war provided yet another look into that period of time. In the past, she is revisiting a possible ancestor, the FitzRoy, nephew of Castlereagh, who captained the Beagle, and whose missionary Christian faith was horribly called in question by the works of his (later enormously famous) passenger Charles Darwin. And there’s a third layer, a tribute to the other Victorians, in the form of Dodgson’s Alice, a mad hatter’s tea-party set in a pastoral landscape, where Charlotte (or one of the people she’s split into) converses looking-glass style with an orang-utan called Jenny and three men who turn up in a boat, and are always demanding more to eat and drink and smoke – Marx, Freud and Darwin (again – he is, as we shall see, the real guru in the woodpile). As Jenny the orang-utan says to these rather bewildered guests of our heroine’s imagination, ‘She believes herself to be doomed. Psychologically. Politically. And genetically. Welcome to the wonderful world of disappointment, boys.’ Until Charlotte gets the hang of her playground by the sea their déjeuner sur l’ herbe is a comically glum affair: ‘The three elderly gentlemen sat in a languid circle on the grassy bank around a bright white cloth covered with the detritus of a picnic lunch. They looked neither comfortable in their formal suits, nor relaxed, yet they sat on.’ In fact they have no choice about the matter since Charlotte herself is, in the colloquial phrase, out to lunch most of the time – just about capable of putting them on trial for having sold her their grand theories (‘I sentence them to wander helplessly in the historical wilderness’) but not very efficient at organising the catering. In this stratum of narrative we’re in ‘Lineage Alley. Limbo Park. Dementia Place. Idyll Mews’. Nowheresville.

Episode two - Favourite books from our guests

She was too young to go to school, but the school allowed her to sit in on classes with the other children so her mother could go to work. "It was wonderful. The children would treat me like a little doll. So all of these things conspired to make my growing up wonderful, really. It wasn't orthodox but it was fine."

In the final section of the memoir Lorna became pregnant and married at age 16. She left the maternity ward one day, and took the first of her A-level exams the next day. She and her husband, Vic Sage, both graduated from the university in Durham with degrees in literature in 1964. The book veered between being utterly compelling (the early part about her grandpa, "the old devil", is the best) and something of a slog; my interest flagged until she met her future husband, Vic. It doesn't really help that she's relentlessly unsympathetic (but how could she help it, growing up in such a volatile household?) Sage's major study of neo-Platonism and English poetry was uncompleted at the time of her death. Instead, there was an abundance of other published work. During the 1970s, she established her reputation as an authoritative reviewer of contemporary fiction. She worked with a number of distinguished literary editors, including Terence Kilmartin at the Observer, and Ian Hamilton at New Review.For Sage, reviewing was serious criticism. Her habit was to read all the available published work of any author she was reviewing. She was deeply engaged by the idea of writing about literature before it became canonical. Her reviewing was an opportunity to forge a style that could be both intelligent and accessible. If having such a brilliant mother and her towering book is a burden, Sharon Tolaini-Sage carries it well and with cheerful good grace. "It is a bit exposing," she says at one point. "It's nice when you meet someone and they know nothing about it." But still, how wonderful to have your family history – and what a family and a history it is – written so beautifully, for ever. "It is amazing," says Sharon, always smiling. Ms Sage is a wonderful writer. The structure and style are somewhat unusual for a memoir, and I definitely appreciate that. Neo-Platonism was a source of endless fascination. It played a crucial role in the English poetic tradition, something that could be traced in the work of Milton, Shelley and, in a transatlantic version, the poetry of Wallace Stevens. More than a set of philosophical doctrines, it offered a way of both imagining and managing the world; it was possible to be both this worldly and other worldly at the same time.

The book spans the 40s, 50s and 60s, the years from her unconventional upbringing in a filthy vicarage, through her council house teens to her graduation from Durham university. One of the most compelling sections is her analysis of the failings of her vicar grandfather, responsible for the ‘bad blood’ she is later believed to inherit. Without reverting to bitterness or emotionality, but instead approaching her grandfather as text — it is his diary she plunders for evidence of his depravity — Sage painstakingly pieces together the clues as to what drives his hypocritical and unethical behaviour, not only as vicar but as husband, father and man.Sage married Rupert Hodson in 1979 after meeting him in Florence on a sabbatical. [4] [2] The couple rented a house near Florence from Harry Brewster, where Sage wrote outside academic terms. [3] Autobiography [ edit ] She was aware from a very young age how glamorous her parents were, especially her mother. She remembers clomping alongside her on a walk across the park, Sharon in ugly Clarks shoes, her mother, barefoot and wearing a slinky catsuit zipped down to her navel. "I always think of going to nightmare parent-teacher nights at my junior school and my dad turning up in a brown velvet suit and my mother wearing a Biba outfit. I was horrified, of course. My school friends would say it must be fantastic to have such groovy young parents, but I just wanted them to be middle-aged."