A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip
Written by Alexander Masters
Narrated by Alexander Masters
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About this audiobook
Unique, transgressive and as funny as its subject, A Life Discarded has all the suspense of a murder mystery. Written with his characteristic warmth, respect and humour, Masters asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap.
A Life Discarded is a biographical detective story. In 2001, 148 tattered and mould-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation.
A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life. The author of the diaries, known only as ‘I’, is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Part thrilling detective story, part love story, part social history, A Life Discarded is also an account of two writers’ obsessions: of ‘I’s need to record every second of life and of Masters’ pursuit of this mysterious yet universal diarist.
Alexander Masters
Alexander Masters is an author and homeless worker. He is the author of Stuart: A Life Backwards and The Genius in My Basement. Stuart: a Life Backwards, was a Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Guardian First Book Award and Whitbread Book of the Year 2005 in the Biography category. He recently adapted Stuart: a Life Backwards for a BBC film. Alexander Masters lives in London.
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Reviews for A Life Discarded
45 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simply Mind blowing. I mean: how do you classify this? It is, as it happens, a biography, yet there were many times when I wondered if I was being drawn into an elaborate philosophico-literary hoax, sort of Ern Malley meet Jostein Gaarder. But it isn’t. It is a biography, based on 148 diaries found in a skip. Or it's a musing, on the biographer’s art. Or is it a science? No, clearly it’s an art, but then: so is science. Or physics is. Maths is just dull. Masters provides us both insights. The subject of the biography, on the other hand, isn’t dull. She is “I” for a long time, leaving a sort of Dylanesque “I and I” love triangle between Masters and Me and Her. Well in fact she isn’t ever “her” for a while, until she gets her menstrual period. That tends to indicate that she is. But nothing is certain in this perichoretic dance of truth. I becomes Not-Mary, then Laura, and eventually becomes Laura Francis – Laura Penrose Francis, in fact. She certainly isn’t dull. Or she is, if degrees of dull are measured by headlines and column inches and pixels. But they aren’t. Perhaps, as Masters suggests (303) she is “deafened by solipsism.” But she isn’t, and Masters tells us that to, yet again, demonstrate how conjectural the biographer’s art is. And he should know, because this is his third biography. So what does this say about his first and second biographies?Indeed does it say anything? Does it simply admit that we are all solipsistic, subjective, centres of our own universe? If it does, then Laura Penrose Francis is a hero, because, inadvertently, she tells us something about ourselves. I say that not merely because I too am a diarist, trapped in Sisyphean self-importance, desperately hoping there is some purpose to my self-absorption or even my life, but because while Laura tells us of her own self-importance it transpires that, in the end, she is rather modest and unpretentious, far, far removed from the narcissism of a Johnny Depp or a Justin Bieber. In any case, is this about Laura at all? Certainly it’s not about Alexander Masters, except insofar as it is about his utter fallibility. Perhaps it’s a tribute to Richard Grove, who mooched around Cambridge with his shirt hanging out, but whose life becomes restricted to a wheelchair? Or is it about Dido Davies, whose life is restricted by neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas until she becomes not alive, not about at all? None of us see around the next corner, after all … but Laura told us about the most recent corner, and summonsed Haydn, Beethoven, Mussolini, Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey and a myriad ghosts and chimera along the way.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was a good case of "never judge a book by its cover". I bypassed this one for a while because the cover just looked too teenage (I'm an adult who just happens to still read a lot of children's/YA fiction). And yet when I did get round to it, I found it completely absorbing. One of those can't-put-it-down books. And I absolutely hadn't guessed the twist at the end!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5In Broken Soup, three freaky things happened to upset fifteen-year-old Rowan’s life. The first thing was that her older brother died from a freak swimming accident in France. As a result, her mother withdraw into herself and her father withdrew from her daily life, moving out of the house, leaving Rowan to care for her mother and her younger sister, Stroma. The second thing was an unknown boy standing behind her at the local coffee shop handing her a photo negative which he said dropped out of her bag. She knew she didn’t drop it.The third occurrence was Bee, a high school senior she never knew or socialized with, coming up to her at lunch and asking about the negative. She was also in line at the coffee shop. This confluence of events and their later unraveling, leads to totally unimagined and unforeseen results. You see, the negative was a photo of her brother, looking extremely happy. The boy, Harper, who gave Rowan the negative, is a New Yorker traveling around Europe (Rowan lives in London) whose current address is an ambulance with all the creature comforts of home. And Bee, well, I’ll let you find out who Bee is.Jenny Valentine has written an intriguing second novel. The main characters are interesting and, in some cases quirky: from Stroma, the precocious six-year-old, to Harper, living in an ambulance, to Carl, Bee’s father who smokes marijuana and is more like a father than Rowan’s own father. There is some intrigue as Rowan seeks more information about the photo and about her brother. There is love on many levels: boys and girls, mothers and fathers, parents and children. And finally, there is the realization that not all burdens should fall on the shoulders of a fifteen-year-old. Broken Soup is a quick but fulfilling read.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Completely unputdownable true story. A couple of academics find a skip outside a renovated house containing 148 notebooks. Intrigued they remove them- fifty-years worth of diaries. But whose? They pass them on to the author...Masters begins reading them, not knowing even the gender of their writer. In no order.. angst-ridden teenage outpourings give way to troubled adulthood and old age....Gleaning hints along the way: a job (but the establishment's long destroyed all records); an address (but did she actually live there? Anyway, it's burnt down), Masters employs the services of a graphologist and a private detective, while creating a composite picture of the elusive diarist. The interest doesnt particularly come from the writer (who, it turns out, wrote vastly more yet.) - this is not a person who succeeds in life or does anything of note besides writing reams on her thoughts. But it's the witness to a person's inner life from 13 to old age. And unlike a novel or carefully crafted biography, "Four decades before people began wearing prtable computers to brecord their physiological data and video their lives, Laura began a more perceptive work: a daily record of an ordinary woman's thoughts about her existewnce, written without any artfulness or false dreams- written, so to speak, from the inside."One of my stand out reads of 2021.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5As I started reading this book it felt familiar. The feeling grew and I finally checked out Alexander Masters and found that he wrote "Stuart: A life backwards" which I watched as a film because I like Tom Hardy. Then I checked back to the New York Times review of "A Life Discarded" which put me on to this book, and, of course, Stuart Shorter is in there too. I surely did not remember that while I was reading.There is a tempo to Mr. Masters' writing, that somehow came through in the film, although I guess Mr. Hardy and the whole production crew read the book as prep for filming and somehow, oddly, really, the rhythm carried through.This circularity aside, "A Life Discarded" is a peculiar book. First it is incredible that the diaries were found in the first place; so much of our written work is being lost forever. Then, that they were passed to a biographer of oddball people. And then, the discovery that the 148 notebooks are only about 17% of the whole.Mr. Masters treats his reading as a mystery. Who is this woman? Why did she write. It was inevitable, I suppose, that Mr. Masters would try to find her, but I found myself wishing that he had not. It's a little different from trying to guess what passersby do for a living because Mr. Masters had years to develop his ideas about the elusive Laura. He plays down any shocks he felt when he finally met Laura Francis whose life he had reconstructed. Revelations are there, of course, but he did not fall over. His relationship with her sounds cordial and measured and she gives permission to publish the book.Framing the book as a mystery makes this book readable, and the title evokes the question of the value we place on existence. It will seem incredibly dull to some people, but clearly is a treat for others."A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash" by Alexander Masters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5author inherits 148 diaries that a friend found in a dumpster. We follow him as he discovers more and more about the woman who wrote them. Really enjoyable to follow this path with him. And the lesson: "She wrote them but it seems she never read them".
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5148 diaries are found in a skip by two friends of the author of this book, Alexander Masters. They are penned by someone who is obviously a prolific diarist and when, eventually, they find their way into the hands of Masters, he is fascinated by them and the anonymous person who wrote them.A Life Discarded looks at what Masters knows about the diarist from what he has read, and from what he, in time, finds out. Some parts of the book are really interesting, but ultimately I felt the book was lacking a spark, something that could have made me as fascinated as the author clearly was. Overall though, I enjoyed reading it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simply Mind blowing. I mean: how do you classify this? It is, as it happens, a biography, yet there were many times when I wondered if I was being drawn into an elaborate philosophico-literary hoax, sort of Ern Malley meet Jostein Gaarder. But it isn’t. It is a biography, based on 148 diaries found in a skip. Or it's a musing, on the biographer’s art. Or is it a science? No, clearly it’s an art, but then: so is science. Or physics is. Maths is just dull. Masters provides us both insights. The subject of the biography, on the other hand, isn’t dull. She is “I” for a long time, leaving a sort of Dylanesque “I and I” love triangle between Masters and Me and Her. Well in fact she isn’t ever “her” for a while, until she gets her menstrual period. That tends to indicate that she is. But nothing is certain in this perichoretic dance of truth. I becomes Not-Mary, then Laura, and eventually becomes Laura Francis – Laura Penrose Francis, in fact. She certainly isn’t dull. Or she is, if degrees of dull are measured by headlines and column inches and pixels. But they aren’t. Perhaps, as Masters suggests (303) she is “deafened by solipsism.” But she isn’t, and Masters tells us that to, yet again, demonstrate how conjectural the biographer’s art is. And he should know, because this is his third biography. So what does this say about his first and second biographies?Indeed does it say anything? Does it simply admit that we are all solipsistic, subjective, centres of our own universe? If it does, then Laura Penrose Francis is a hero, because, inadvertently, she tells us something about ourselves. I say that not merely because I too am a diarist, trapped in Sisyphean self-importance, desperately hoping there is some purpose to my self-absorption or even my life, but because while Laura tells us of her own self-importance it transpires that, in the end, she is rather modest and unpretentious, far, far removed from the narcissism of a Johnny Depp or a Justin Bieber. In any case, is this about Laura at all? Certainly it’s not about Alexander Masters, except insofar as it is about his utter fallibility. Perhaps it’s a tribute to Richard Grove, who mooched around Cambridge with his shirt hanging out, but whose life becomes restricted to a wheelchair? Or is it about Dido Davies, whose life is restricted by neuroendocrine cancer of the pancreas until she becomes not alive, not about at all? None of us see around the next corner, after all … but Laura told us about the most recent corner, and summonsed Haydn, Beethoven, Mussolini, Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey and a myriad ghosts and chimera along the way.