Rob Edmunds's Reviews > My Autobiography

I've always admired Charlie Chaplin and enjoyed his movies and it was a real pleasure to read the memoir about his incredibly rich and varied life. It is a blend of the confessional, reflective and occasionally reserved, which is probably quite typical of autobiographies. It is a little unbalanced in terms of the phases of his life and the style alters noticeably depending on the part of his life story he's discussing. He is quite revealing of his emotions and affections in his early destitution in London and his affection for his mother and brother is apparent. He describes his craft very well and his transition from the stage to the screen and his meteoric rise to fame. The latter parts of the book often describe encounters with the rich and famous, often at dinner parties. Towards the end this gets a little rushed. For instance, he meets Picasso, Sartre, Kruschev, Nehru and Churchill in the space of a few pages with little acknowledgement that this degree of accessibility to artists, writers and politicians may have been an unique privilege. His language is sometimes florid but I liked that and it may well have been that some of the phrases he used were much more common at the time. It does reveal a keen appreciation for literature and the arts and it seemed to me the eloquence of the autodidact. It's certainly a book I will return to in the future and it is my hope that one day I will write something which touches a little on his life and the people he knew and loved.