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staceylynn42's review against another edition
4.0
This is a very detailed biography by a sympathetic author. I thought her treatment of Christie's 11 missing days to be very realistic if a bit dramatized. Lots of info I hadn't known about decades of tax issues with the US and UK governments. They got most of her money.
It took me a long time to read as it was so detailed but I recommend it
It took me a long time to read as it was so detailed but I recommend it
stacey42's review against another edition
4.0
This is a very detailed biography by a sympathetic author. I thought her treatment of Christie's 11 missing days to be very realistic if a bit dramatized. Lots of info I hadn't known about decades of tax issues with the US and UK governments. They got most of her money.
It took me a long time to read as it was so detailed but I recommend it
It took me a long time to read as it was so detailed but I recommend it
meiklejohn's review
slow-paced
1.0
Can't at all fathom why Thompson felt the need to turn this biography into a misogynistic, conservative, and fatphobic diatribe. It starts with her railing against "modern women" who are fighting against their "biology" by wanting careers and individual lives, and a venomous hostility towards women pervades every mention of Christie's characters, plots, and social circle (without evidence, Thompson states that every time a man did professional wrong by Christie his wife set him onto it).
Thompson describes real-life female murder victims as "harridans" who, implicitly, deserved it; she bashes Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh as inferior to Christie because they were "too feminine". It's a relentless attempt to make Christie Not Like Other Girls, although Thompson's open disgust at Christie gaining weight in her 40s gets immense page space as well.
And then we have apologia for Christie's xenophobia and classism, which is telegraphed in the introduction by Thompson describing refugees as "lurching down [English] streets" (I was so taken aback by this I nearly ditched the book then, which would have been the wiser choice). Thompson spends pages and pages claiming that Christie didn't actually have a racist bone in her body; she was just being a super-clever author by using racial slurs all the time, including in her titles, and her frequent use of them proves that they were "meaningless" to her, which Thompson then claims means she wasn't racist (it in fact means the exact opposite).
Laura Thompson basically pretended to write an entire biography to justify supporting Brexit and to bash women. I loved her book about the Mitford sisters, but this book was a garbage fire of a conservative agenda.
annarella's review against another edition
4.0
A must read for any Agatha Christie's fan. It's a mix of biography and bibliography and it was an interesting, entertaining and engrossing read.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.
catherine_t's review against another edition
4.0
Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time. Her sales are just behind the Bible and Shakespeare's works. Many dismiss her works as simply light entertainment, read to relieve the tedium of a train journey perhaps. There is more, however, beneath the surface.
Laura Thompson had unique access to Christie's diaries, letters, family, and friends, and it shows. Her biography is deep, detailed, and well-written. Thompson had the opportunity to interview not only Christie's grandson Mathew Prichard, but Christie's daughter Rosalind and son-in-law Anthony Hicks, as well as her nephew (by her second marriage to Max Mallowan) John. Being able to speak to people who really knew your subject is a great boon to any biographer--always allowing for their personal biases, of course. Having access to personal writings, too, is fantastic; you can get a real feeling for your subject through their letters. I fear that in the future, biographies will be thin things, what with the growth in electronic communication. (Who keeps an email any longer than needed to answer it?)
I've long been a fan of Christie's work, but up until now the only biographical work on her I've read is Robert Barnard's A Talent to Deceive, which if I recall correctly is more an appreciation of her work than a real biography. I feel Laura Thompson has written the definitive life of Agatha Christie here. Anyone searching for a good in-depth examination of Christie's life and work couldn't do better than to read this book.
Laura Thompson had unique access to Christie's diaries, letters, family, and friends, and it shows. Her biography is deep, detailed, and well-written. Thompson had the opportunity to interview not only Christie's grandson Mathew Prichard, but Christie's daughter Rosalind and son-in-law Anthony Hicks, as well as her nephew (by her second marriage to Max Mallowan) John. Being able to speak to people who really knew your subject is a great boon to any biographer--always allowing for their personal biases, of course. Having access to personal writings, too, is fantastic; you can get a real feeling for your subject through their letters. I fear that in the future, biographies will be thin things, what with the growth in electronic communication. (Who keeps an email any longer than needed to answer it?)
I've long been a fan of Christie's work, but up until now the only biographical work on her I've read is Robert Barnard's A Talent to Deceive, which if I recall correctly is more an appreciation of her work than a real biography. I feel Laura Thompson has written the definitive life of Agatha Christie here. Anyone searching for a good in-depth examination of Christie's life and work couldn't do better than to read this book.
cricketsclubhouse's review against another edition
1.0
I read Christie’s autobiography, which I loved, and obviously I love her books. I wanted to read a biographer’s take on her life. But I had to put this one down. What bizarre writing. The author makes statements about Christie’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, and supports those statements with quotes from her novels. Kind of insulting to imply that she was only capable of conveying her own personal beliefs through her characters and not write, oh I don’t know, fiction?? In addition to this strange choice, the writing is rambling, pretentious, and disjointed. One thought in a sentence, then a completely different, unconnected statement in the next. Really strange.
lenzschmidt's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.0
This book was a letdown. It is repetitive, incredibly long-winded and all over the place. The author takes Christie's fiction to prove how she must have felt about events in her life. It's a strange biography.
lirazel's review against another edition
3.5
I think I'm going to give this a 3.5?
I don't like feeling this conflicted about a book and being so torn about how to rate it. There's a lot to appreciate here--the research that went into it was clearly exhaustive, and you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Agatha Christie in this book. Thompson traces the whole course of her life in great detail and I really felt that I got to know her. In addition, I found Thompson's prose style very easy to read and also enjoyable.
But goodness, she wants to editorialize. Too much. She adds these very weird personal insights to things, making sweeping judgments about ideas or attitudes. Why am I supposed to care about her own personal feelings on things? I'm here for Agatha Christie, not Laura Thompson.
In addition, she makes specious ties between Christie's personal life and her fiction. Perhaps because Thompson is a writer of nonfiction and not fiction, she seems unable to understand that everything a fiction writer writes is not necessarily reflective of her own life. In practically every paragraph, Thompson compares some fact of Christie's life to some quote or scene from one of her books. A little of this might be fine, even effective, but Thompson takes it too far. Sometimes writers of fiction make things up. Sometimes they write things that have nothing to do with their own lives. Many of her comparisons seem a stretch, not to mention that the book as a whole could have been at least a hundred pages shorter if she didn't do this all the time. As a writer of fiction, the idea that someone might think that I'm constantly writing about my own life in my fiction when I'm not is horrifying to me. I can only imagine how Christie would feel about it if she knew.
She also attributes thoughts or feelings to Christie and other people that I'm not sure she could possibly know. Maybe she did indeed read them in letters or diaries, but they don't come across as paraphrased quotes but as pure invention or at least learned guesses. Sometimes she quotes without an endnote, and I can't tell if the quote is from a Christie letter/diary/other paper or from her fiction.
As is usual with my complaints about nonfiction books, most if not all of the book's problems could have been fixed by a good editor. Why do editors give in so much to their writers' self-indulgences? A good editor is a rare thing, apparently, but they make a great contribution.
So: excellent information, enjoyable prose, lots of extraneous editorializing. Your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you can put up with the latter.
I don't like feeling this conflicted about a book and being so torn about how to rate it. There's a lot to appreciate here--the research that went into it was clearly exhaustive, and you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Agatha Christie in this book. Thompson traces the whole course of her life in great detail and I really felt that I got to know her. In addition, I found Thompson's prose style very easy to read and also enjoyable.
But goodness, she wants to editorialize. Too much. She adds these very weird personal insights to things, making sweeping judgments about ideas or attitudes. Why am I supposed to care about her own personal feelings on things? I'm here for Agatha Christie, not Laura Thompson.
In addition, she makes specious ties between Christie's personal life and her fiction. Perhaps because Thompson is a writer of nonfiction and not fiction, she seems unable to understand that everything a fiction writer writes is not necessarily reflective of her own life. In practically every paragraph, Thompson compares some fact of Christie's life to some quote or scene from one of her books. A little of this might be fine, even effective, but Thompson takes it too far. Sometimes writers of fiction make things up. Sometimes they write things that have nothing to do with their own lives. Many of her comparisons seem a stretch, not to mention that the book as a whole could have been at least a hundred pages shorter if she didn't do this all the time. As a writer of fiction, the idea that someone might think that I'm constantly writing about my own life in my fiction when I'm not is horrifying to me. I can only imagine how Christie would feel about it if she knew.
She also attributes thoughts or feelings to Christie and other people that I'm not sure she could possibly know. Maybe she did indeed read them in letters or diaries, but they don't come across as paraphrased quotes but as pure invention or at least learned guesses. Sometimes she quotes without an endnote, and I can't tell if the quote is from a Christie letter/diary/other paper or from her fiction.
As is usual with my complaints about nonfiction books, most if not all of the book's problems could have been fixed by a good editor. Why do editors give in so much to their writers' self-indulgences? A good editor is a rare thing, apparently, but they make a great contribution.
So: excellent information, enjoyable prose, lots of extraneous editorializing. Your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you can put up with the latter.