A number one bestseller in Britain, Stephen Fry's astonishingly frank, funny, wise memoir is the book that his fans everywhere have been waiting for. Since his PBS television debut in the Blackadder series, the American profile of this multitalented writer, actor and comedian has grown steadily, especially in the wake of his title role in the film Wilde, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and his supporting role in A Civil Action.
Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion. Praise for Moab Is My Washpot
"Fry is a master of provocative tangents and he remembers with a cheeky wit . . . Delicious."
-The New Yorker
"An engagingly rueful memoir . . . Enormously entertaining."
-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Book Review
"This book bubbles; it boils and it bubbles with wonderful language, quick wit, and loopy digression . . . [Fry's] voice is delightfully irreverent, cozy, smart, funny and insightfully honest . . . A great read!"
-Spalding Gray
"Stephen Fry is one of the great originals . . . That so much outward charm, self
awareness and intellect should exist alongside behaviour that threatened to ruin
the lives of the innocent victims, noble parents and Fry himself, gives the book
a tragic grandeur that lifts it to classic status."
-Financial Times
"Fry, well known for his television roles in the British comedies Jeeves and Wooster and Blackadder, continues to entertain in this fresh and hilarious boyhood memoir . . . His hindsight provides witty entertainment in this gay coming-of-age story that will delight readers . . . With this daring and feisty story, Fry will delight fans and nonfans."
-Booklist
"The engaging Mr. Fry admits to lies, thievery, homosexuality, excessive cleverness, and other peccadilloes in this boarding-school adventure . . . An author in the long and honorable tradition of English Eccentrics, Theatrical Division, presents his coming-of-age story. With all the wit and Pythonesque antics, his book will entertain the Masterpiece Theatre crowd and others as well."
-Kirkus Reviews Stephen Fry is an actor, producer, director, and writer who has appeared in numerous TV series and movies, including Jeeves and Wooster, Wilde, Gosford Park, V for Vendetta and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He is the bestselling author of four novels and several works of nonfiction. He divides his time between New York and the UK. Chapter 1
Joining In
"Look, Marguerite . . . England!"
Closing lines of The Scarlet Pimpernel, 1934
For some reason I recall it as just me and Bunce. No one else in the compartment at all. Just me, eight years and a month old, and this inexpressibly small dab of misery who told me in one hot, husky breath that his name was Samuelanthonyfarlowebunce.
I remember why we were alone now. My mother had dropped us off early at Paddington Station. My second term. The train to Stroud had a whole carriage reserved for us. Usually by the time my mother, brother and I had arrived on the platform there would have been a great bobbing of boaters dipping careless farewells into a sea of entirely unacceptable maternal hats.
Amongst the first to arrive this time, my brother had found a compartment where an older boy already sat amongst his opened tuck-box, ready t
