John Lanchester writes:

In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent relationship with fame and her obsession with money. Speaking for Myself makes that rep seem justified, but it also shows that Cherie grew up with good reason for anxiety about public exposure and financial security. At the age of six weeks her actor parents left her with her paternal grandparents, who raised her until she was two. Not long afterwards her father, the actor Tony Booth, left, and not very long after that he had become, courtesy of his role in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, the most famous non-Beatle Liverpudlian in the country. Cherie was in a perfect position to have all the disadvantages of local celebrity, combined with none of the advantages; her mother had to go to work in a chip shop to support her and her sister, as well as what was then the public ignominy of single motherhood. As for how they found out that Booth had definitively left, it was via a formal announcement placed in the Crosby Herald, announcing the birth of a daughter with his new girlfriend. ‘We had no idea . . . It is difficult to overestimate the humiliation.’ Cherie was eight. No wonder she grew up preoccupied with keeping control of her own secrets, and her children’s privacy, and the need to be financially secure.

(LRB 17 July 2008)

Little Brown | hardback 421 pp. |ISBN: 9781408700983