Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter

by Jenni Murray; Bantam 336pp; £14.99
In 20 years as the host of Radio 4's Woman's Hour, Jenni Murray has established herself as "the nation's matriarch", said Katy Guest in the Independent. So her new book will come as a shock to some fans. It describes the death of her mother and father, and her own battle with breast cancer, but its main subject is the mixture of love and hate that she felt for her mother.

Murray was born to working-class parents in Barnsley. Her mother longed for a boy, was fiercely jealous of her husband's affections, and made endless critical comments about her daughter's appearance and behaviour. ("Such a pity you seem to take after your dad and not me when it comes to genetic inheritance," she would tell her. Even on her deathbed, she told her daughter: "All you can think about is yourself and showing off about the bloody BBC.")

As you might expect, "this book is written in a rather brusque, practical" style devoid of self-pity", said Sarah Vine in the Times. "This is not, however, the heartless memoir of a hardened careerist"; it's a frank, emotional, and often moving exploration of her relationship with her mother and, "by extension, of the cultural abyss between the postwar generation and the baby boomers". Murray's "breathless, flavourless, humourless" style works better on radio than on the page, said Hilary Spurling in the Observer. But her book is worth reading for "its insights into the changing lives of women". Her description of her mother's housekeeping routine, in the days before electrical devices, is "salutary".

FIRST POSTED JULY 31, 2008