Agatha Christie's Autobiography - a review

After reading almost all of her canon of work, I've delved into one of Agatha Christie's most important tomes - her autobiography. Though published in the months after her death, it covered her life up to when she was in her seventies, about ten years before she died. Whilst I was reading and discovering her books, I'd built up a strong image of who she was - by what subjects she wrote about, or information regarding the publishing of her books, or that famous disappearance - and even some particularly autobiographical characters she created. So, how would I find reading this, her own, perhaps definitive, account of an eventful life?

The book is a long one - it weighs in at 250,000 words, and took her fifteen years to complete it. But the extra time was worth it, as it's packed full of interesting stories and happenings. And whilst there are digressions along the way, it has all the economy - and excitement - of one of her great books.

People who are expecting a complete guide of every process that goes into writing one of her novels are going to be disappointed - it's an autobiography after all, a personal account of the story of her life. The books rarely feature - and when they do, they're the ones that she considers important personally, or that she has strong memories of, or has picked out as a good book when reading back many years later. There's particularly a fair amount about how she came to write her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and also the publishing side of things.
It's interesting to read how at first Agatha Christie didn't consider herself as a novel writer, but as a wife who started to do that sort of thing on the side to make some extra money. Ten years on, and she found herself writing books even when she didn't want to - a sign, for her, that it was now a job, and she would write a book every year. There are recollections of crafting some of her early work - the light hearted adventure type thrillers "that are more fun, and quicker to write", yet few of the period in the 1930s in which some of her most acclaimed detective stories were published. However, she also delves into other parts of her work (such as poems, short stories, romantic novels and acclaimed plays) and interestingly, her thoughts on the process of writing, and how she came to do it in the first place. Written in the first person, she shares a lot of personal opinions, and it builds up a picture of her own character - and in one frank section, she simply gives us a list of things she likes and things she doesn't!

That's not to say the life she's lead isn't recognisable as something out of a Christie novel. Plenty of autobiographical detail seems to have been included in her work, sure to be picked up on by those who have read it. Things like travelling on the Orient Express, dig sites in Syria and Iraq, or an exotic business holiday to South Africa, which was then extensively used in the early thriller The Man in the Brown Suit. Much of her childhood seems very close to the Mary Westmacott romantic novels, in which she painted a picture of someone's life story - some things copied word for word - and later novels, like Postern of Fate. But these references are fewer than you'd think - she says she rarely based characters on anybody in real life, certainly not people she knew, and after all - in her eyes, they were purely escapism.
Rather, the avid Agatha Christie reader gets a sense of the time she was living in, and the wider world in which her books were written in - a time of country houses, servants, generations of men becoming soldiers, and unexpected foreign travels. It's easy to forget that some of the events she describes happened over a hundred years ago.

After a slow start, though with many detailed recollections of her early years - no less busy than her later ones, as her parents moved around France as she was growing up - she then covers the events of her reaching adulthood, with plenty of prospective husbands! Personally, I found the book picked up pace, despite the many amusing and heartfelt events of her childhood - and became even more interesting when it went on to cover the events of the First World War, and the interesting world of the VADs, and events that would strongly shape her future.

The book, and by extension her own life, covers a lot of ground - from schooling, to nursing, to travelling round the world - and is often a joy to read. Her books are often praised for their readability, and this one is just the same. Despite the length, it's accessible, enjoyable and moving - giving us an insight into the modest, retiring crime writer, whose audience - including me - previously only knew through her detective novels.