My Family: The Memoir

by David Baddiel

4th Estate, £22

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As the writer and comedian David Baddiel often likes to clarify, comedy is how he processes everything. As this wince-inducing family memoir testifies, this includes his parents’ general disinterest in him and his brothers during their childhood and, indeed, into adulthood. Long before Jews didn’t count, the junior Baddiels were invariably an afterthought in the natural disaster that was Sarah and Colin’s marriage.

It wasn’t all bad. Baddiel grew up in Dollis Hill and attended (despite his father’s avowed distaste for religion) North West London Jewish Day School, and then Haberdashers’. The family weren’t well off, but they weren’t on the breadline.

Nonetheless, the upbringing he describes is unenviable – a father “living without an emotional life”, a mother having an affair so blatant that at one point she intentionally copied her sons into a graphic email to her lover. Old age did little to diminish their quirks; indeed, Baddiel wonders whether his father’s appalling behaviour in his final years was due to dementia or merely his personality. “No – this is exactly who he is,” Baddiel thinks, after his dad is wheeled into surgery making V-signs. In another anecdote, Colin is thrown out of a Jewish centre for the elderly for telling another dementia patient he had a big nose.

It’s grim, except it’s also incredibly heartfelt, and interesting too as a portrait of postwar Jewry, the thwarted prospects of intelligent women, and a time before parenting became a competitive sport. Drawing on his time as a stand-up during the 1980s and 1990s, Baddiel offers a window into the comedy landscape of that period, not to mention a few celebrity indiscretions. He notes too his troublesome inclination to truth telling and doesn’t hold back, right down to recounting what his parents sounded like in bed together. The reader both laughs – and breathes a sigh of relief it’s not them.

Baddiel’s style – endless digressions, cut-out newspaper articles, footnotes and chatty asides addressing the reader – won’t be for everyone. But his narrative voice makes it easy to remember this is a real person and real feelings you are reading about, even as you cringe.

It’s not necessarily new material – if you’ve seen a Baddiel show, you may be familiar with his story. But it’s far more compelling than most celebrity memoirs, because Baddiel has written it as a celebration of his parents, warts and all. Complex though his relationship was with them, you never doubt that his book comes from a place of love.

Were his parents awful? Absolutely, yes – they were self-absorbed, and faintly ridiculous. Were their flaws in part a hangover from their childhoods, not least his mother’s escape from Nazi Germany in her infancy? Probably. Has Baddiel very effectively mined it all for content, taking Nora Ephron’s “everything is copy” to heart? Unmistakably yes, too.

Did he need to share this story? Perhaps not. But you get the sense that it’s helped him come to terms with everything, while for readers it’s a treat.