Moab Is My Washpot

„Well, I tell you now that everything I feel now everything I am now is truer and better than anything I shall ever be. Ever. This is me now, the real me. Every day that I grow away from the me that is writing this now is a betrayal and a defeat.“

So Stephen Fry, aged fifteen, wrote in a letter to himself, not to be read until he was twenty-five.

Sent to a boarding school two hundred miles from home at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love, ecstasy, carnal violation, expulsion, imprisonment, criminal conviction probation and catastrophe to emerge, at eighteen years of age, ready to try and face a world in which he had always felt a stranger.

The Stephen Fry of „Jeeves & Wooster,“ ‘Fry & Laurie,“ „Blackadder,“ and „Wilde,“ the Stephen Fry whose novels have sold over a million copies and whose public face has been seen on television and cinema screens the world over, reveals his private face in an autobiography that is in turns funny, shocking, tender, delicious, sad, lyrical, bruisingly frank and always compulsively, addictively readable.

Whether the real Stephen Fry is the man now living, or the extraordinary adolescent now dead, only the reader will be able to decide.