Title: An Autobiography
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Non-Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 560
Rating: 4*/5
Agatha Christie – An Autobiography
Wow, this was pretty epic. I mean, it’s a long old book based on just the page count alone, but it’s also super dense with tiny writing and hardly any gaps between the different pages. That means that it takes a huge time investment if you want to get through it and if you have the same edition that I do, you’re also going to need some decent lighting.
This also isn’t the book for you unless you’re a serious Agatha Christie fan. That’s because by its very nature, we spend a lot of time learning about Christie’s early life and her personal life, which really won’t mean much to you unless you want to find out more about what makes her tick. It also places much less focus on her individual books than I was expecting, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, we get to see how Christie saw herself, and that’s not necessarily as a novelist. It took her a long time to realise that she could be a writer by profession.
We also don’t get to see what happened when she famously went missing, although that’s hardly a surprise because she said in interviews that she wasn’t too sure herself. But the good news is that Christie’s writing is so entrancing, as it always is, that she could be talking about absolutely anything and it wouldn’t matter. As it is, she talks a lot about the society that she lived in and covers everything from the effects of the two World Wars to what the family unit looked like back in the early half of the 20th century.
Agatha Christie
Christie was also something of an adventurer, travelling around to Syria and Iraq, flying in an aeroplane less than ten years after the Wright brothers demonstrated their first powered flight and even becoming one of the first English women to go surfing. She really lived a remarkably full life and this book is the result of that all. Sure, it pretty much comes to a stop after the end of the Second World War and misses out much of her later life, but then it would have been a massive book it had kept on going and it was already published posthumously as is.
My enjoyment of this book was also boosted by the fact that I buddy read it with a BookTube friend of mine called Bookslikewoah. She’s been doing “Project Poirot” and reading a bunch of Agatha Christie for that, and so it’ll be interesting to see what she makes of it. We’re both big Agatha Christie fans and the perfect audience for a book like this. As to whether I’d recommend it to my mum? Probably not, and she’s a big fan of Agatha Christie and detective/crime novels too.
All in all then, I really enjoyed reading this book and I feel super accomplished because I finished it. I feel like I got to know Christie a lot more, but I also feel as though this background information will help me to get more from her other books when I get to them. I’m also glad I read it because this was the single biggest obstacle to stop me from reading her entire bibliography.
Agatha Christie Quote
