The art of writing in an interesting fashion about your own life is still severely underestimated. Having had an interesting life doesn't do the trick, as I found out many years ago when I slogged through Marlene Dietrich's memoirs, which were deadly dull, despite the facts of her life being certainly of the fascinating kind. But not many people who excell in other arts are also good writers, and then there's the way many modern autobiographies are written, with a ghostwriter doing the honours, which often results in generic voices. So every time I come across a memoir that isn't just interesting in terms of reported content but actually has style, I'm over the moon. Which certainly is the case with Luck and Circumstance. In fact, it's such a joy to read in terms of just savouring the fine descriptions - its author is a director, and it shows in the best way - that I immediately read it again, and not simply because it manages to combine several of my eras of interest: Hollywod and New York in the 40s, Swinging London in the 60s, convoluted family relationships.

In a way, I think it helps that our author never quite made it to star status himself; it makes him an excellent observer of everyone else, inside and outside the various circles at the same time. He was the son of actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, and the various candidates for the position of his father - her first husband who gave Michael his name, Orson Welles whom his mother had an affair with and who for a long time is Michael's fantasy father, and her second husband who did the actual raising but never quite connected - make for a surplus of father figures regarded with varying emotional investment, and that's not touching on Geraldine's lovers without possible fatherhood like Robert Capa or Henry Miller, and her bitter struggle to make it in Hollywood and/or the New York and Dublin stage. Geraldine is the breadwinner in the family and the men have nicknames like "Boy", which makes for a different gender coding from the start. If anyone is the main character of this volume, approached from different angles in a Citizen Kane like fashion, she is, mercurial, determined, changing and recreating her stories all the time.

In the 60s, Michael became a director on the British tv show Ready Steady Go which led to a lot of promos (= future music vids) for the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, culminating in that most depressing of rock documentaries, Let It Be. But before we reach the infamous breakup in 1969, our hero has, in 1966, such problems as to whether dine with Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich or to meet the Beatles for lunch so he'll get hired to shoot the promo for Paperback Writer. May I volunteer for that kind of problem? (Not really. I like my family situation better. Also, Orson & Marlene on the one hand versus John, Paul, George and Ringo on the other are a cruel, cruel choice.) Whereas I'm really glad not to have one of his later dilemmas, when he prepared, cast, and shot a great deal of the tv version of Brideshead Revisited only to be foiled by an unholy combination of the big union strike and his mother getting dementia, with the result of being replaced as a director of that future tv classic.

Now for the quotable goodies to show you what I mean re: MLHs writing style.

( On Orson, Mick & Keith, the Beatles, Jeremy Irons and Geraldine Fitzgerald )