Fay Weldon: Auto Da Fay

By CARROLL du CHATEAU

Fay Weldon has charitable memories; hers is a generous autobiography. Despite an early life that included being left with her previously distant father when she was 4 and her sister 5, while her mother bolted back to England, she writes fondly of both parents. Overall, "probably the life that was lived was the best that could be done: even, to the outsider, better than could have been expected," reads the dust jacket in this, the first of her memoirs.

This slice of Weldon's life takes in the first 30-odd years, from the time when she was nearly born in Napier, New Zealand (her mother whisked herself and tummy back to England where Weldon was born in 1931) to her marriage to Ron Weldon in the early 60s. In between comes a life crammed with ups and downs, men, books, babies, sex, poverty, ghosts - and, of course, the writing that kept her together, soul and body.

Weldon is not a snobbish writer. She used her talent to feed her family, her career to feed her head, and revelled in her days in advertising where her slogan for the British Egg Marketing Board - "Go to work on an egg" - became as much an icon as the Milky Bar Kid.

And, throughout, you get the feeling that Weldon sailed on, unflappable, talented, funny and with the kind of generous nature that accepts what happens with alacrity - and maybe a touch of bewilderment.

As Weldon explains it, she inherited three important characteristics. First, her mother's delight in nature: "Sometimes, in the dawn of a bright day - I would always get up with the sun if I was allowed - I would be conscious of the exhilaration that filled the natural world."

Second, both parents' talent for poetry and writing. Third, her grandfather Edgar's joy in sex. "I saw sex as both a sacrament and enlightenment, I saw the coming together of two people ... as the best-possible way of being part of the creation ... I stay full of sympathy for those bands of noisy bad girls who go out to pubs and clubs, wild and dissolute, looking for sex. Of course they do: what else is beautiful in their lives, but the dark ecstasy of being part of another person."

She is refreshingly open-minded, airily dismissing ideas of inconsistency as she swoops from free-thinking to formal religion, and from twice-weekly counselling-type therapy to today's total dismissal.

For us New Zealanders though, the early chapters are probably the most interesting. The little girl who toddled off the boat from Britain had piercing observational skills; the 71-year-old woman has a brilliant ability to make the memories come alive.

"I remember my mother turning cartwheels on the lawn, white legs flashing, short skirt whirling, and being overwhelmed with admiration. None of my friends' mothers turned cartwheels. They wore pinnies and made apple pies."

There was the bout of polio that brought her mother, who had bolted back to England, back to her side. The sudden, terrifying plunge into a Catholic boarding school, the father who forgot to turn up to take his daughters out, the mother who finally bundled them back on the Rangitoto and to the even more complex world back "home".

Throughout, Weldon writes with underplayed insight. As a young girl, she caught the "sad anxiety" on her stepmother's face (typically, she loved her stepmother) when her father referred to his receptionist as a "willowy blonde", and hated him for causing such pain. "It would be so easy for him to reassure her, but he wouldn't. Men had too much power, I thought for the first, and not for the last time, to make women suffer."

Even her sister Jane's tragic descent into madness and death from a brain tumour is accepted with grace, though "the emptiness left behind was terrible".

My only quibbles with Auto Da Fay are structural. The beginning, which in an effort to set up its message - the repeating rhythms of life - skips between generations of Birkinshaws (Weldon's maiden name) with speed and disdain for a chronological narrative, is hard to follow.

Although the book is divided into tantalising slices with workmanlike headings (New Mothers, Among the Dispossessed) there is no index, while the black and white photographs that pepper the memoir are captioned only in an index at the beginning.

The end, which even Weldon admits she had trouble with, comes with rather a bump.

But that is more than made up for by the wonderful writing, the insight, the sheer fun of a life so thoroughly lived.

Flamingo, $39.95

* Carroll du Chateau is editor of Weekend Life.