When I Grow Up: A Memoir

by Bernice Rubens (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $5.80

  'My mother said I was over imaginative, but I was simply a liar by nature. I was happily at home with mendacity. It was less boring than the truth. My natural home lay in fiction.' Booker-prize winning writer Bernice Rubens' poignant, evocative and funny memoir reveals not only many of the origins of her darkly brilliant novels, but brings to life her war-time childhood, her work as a film-maker and her deep friendships - and some equally deep enmities - in the literary world which she enlivened so magnificently. Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004, very soon after completing WHEN I GROW UP.

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.80

  In a rare foray outside that natural home, Booker Prize-winner Bernice Rubens penned these memoirs 'while I still have a memory'. Poignantly, the highly-acclaimed author, literary bon-vivante and celebrated film-maker died shortly after completing them. She wasn't quite expecting that but nor, as she reveals in these pages, did she expect to become a writer. It wasn't the sort of thing that happened to girls born in Glossop Terrace in Splott, the 'unmentionable and indisputable armpit of Cardiff'.

  In this delightful evocation of her own life, Rubens escorts us, with a flotilla of anecdotes, away from that armpit through her wartime childhood, her first 'major folly' (studying English at University) to stints as a teacher, lady's maid and actress before stumbling upon a career that bemused her until the end of her days. 'What shall I do,' was her constant internal refrain, 'when I grow up?'

  Bernice Rubens died in the autumn of 2004.