A laugh and a tear with David Baddiel
Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin
What does it mean to ‘spill the beans’ about family, to look beyond the curated images we present to the world in social media? Two years ago, I read American feminist Letty Pogrebin’s book Shanda: A memoir of shame and secrecy, which exposed her family’s fiercely guarded secrets. With a keen eye, a sharp tongue and a ruthless pen, she spiralled through the hidden secrets of parents, aunts, uncles and cousins, describing their personal traumas, marital misery, abandoned children, sexual identity and religious transgressions. She confidently believed her story had universal relevance. It certainly caused waves among the ladies of my suburban book-club, none of whom that day took Letty’s advice to free themselves of the shackles of secrecy.
Now celebrated comedian and author of Jews Don’t Count, David Baddiel, has emerged as a truth-teller of magnitude with the publication of My Family: The Memoir. He prepares us for his frank narrative by confiding that he has no filter and is addicted to the truth, which his book clearly confirms. His canvas is much smaller than Pogrebin’s, as he focuses on his immediate family, with one exception, the portrait of his mother’s lover. But it is a deep dive into wounded souls, battered psyches and bruised hearts, all rendered with remarkable humour and piercing wit.
The central character is undoubtedly David’s mother, Sarah, whose infidelity, affair and lifelong infatuation with David White, a salesman of golfing memorabilia, compensates for her dysfunctional marriage and lower middle-class environment. Her boorish, brilliant and disinhibited husband, Dr Colin Baddiel—he has a PhD in chemistry—loses his job in science and, instead, sells dinky toys at a local market. There is a chronic lack of money and love in the household and, more importantly, both parents neglect and generally ignore their three sons, Ivor, David and Dan. Fortunately, Ivor, 18 months older than David, parents him, gives him breakfast and sees him onto the bus for school and generally protects him as much as possible throughout their childhood and adolescence. This is the seemingly loveless crucible from which David emerges, understandably hurt and damaged by a childhood of unreciprocated affection.
This sounds poignant and painful, and it is. But the reader will find it all excruciatingly funny. There are jokes in unexpected places, an abundance of witticisms and humorous observations that are in the laugh-out-loud category. These are not the ‘three men enter a pub’ jokes, but insightful stories and personal reflections with which readers may agree. It is surprisingly easy to empathise with Baddiel as he explores gaping lacunae, the emotional emptiness within which the vulnerable child floundered in his loveless childhood. Or was it? The truth is always complex. In his pursuit of his truth, Baddiel helps himself to understand his parents and, in doing so, draws closer to their identities he re-fashions.
After Sarah’s death aged 75, Colin spirals further into dementia, aggravated by Pick’s disease, He is not the stereotypical dementia patient staring comatosed into space. ‘Picks creates a wildly different state, almost the opposite, from that image,’ Baddiel writes, ‘a mad, antic condition, whirling and crazed and disinhibited, in which those with it take their clothes off in public and shout obscenities and try to have sex with people who are not their husbands or wives.’ These were characteristics that his father had always possessed, so the condition aggravated his normal public display exponentially, leading to all types of absurdity. Baddiel acknowledges that this is distressing for many relatives, ‘But not quite, for me’, he states. ‘I am a comedian, and one reason I am a comedian is that from a very early age, I was taught that there is very little that cannot be said, that swearing is perfectly normal, and that saying extreme things to shock may be gratuitous but can also be very funny.’ It is probably wise to give a trigger warning to sensitive readers about two varieties of four-letter words that populate Baddiel’s pages, which some might find offensive. They’re Anglo-Saxon words in common currency today and their shock value has diminished in popular culture.
If one can get past the robust language, there is much to commend this penetrating memoir, especially its searing honesty. Written in a colloquial style, it is an immensely funny and deeply affecting story of emotional poverty that traumatises a generation. It also highlights what can be gained by trawling through the family archive to evaluate those difficult years in order to salvage precious memories that, potentially, can heal the harm and hurt of earlier years. Baddiel, who emerges as a loving and very accepting and forgiving son, is to be commended for going where angels fear to tread and making us laugh with him in the process.
My Family: The Memoir
David Baddiel
4th Estate, Harper Collins Publishers, London
2024
