Experience

In his memoir, Experience (2000), British novelist, screenwriter, and professor Martin Amis reflects broadly on his life from childhood to young adulthood, attempting to combine his challenges and revelations into a cohesive story. Amis wrote Experience mainly to qualify and refine stories about his life that had captured the public imagination despite being, in his view, inaccurate. To strengthen his recollections, he draws from hundreds of letters he wrote to his father from childhood into middle age. The book has been sharply criticized for its apparent attempt to control Amis’s public image. Nevertheless, widely praised for its depth of insight and literary quality, it was listed for the Booker Prize, one of the highest awards in British literature.

Experience consists of two parallel threads. In the first, Amis reproduces letters, mostly from his childhood and young adulthood, which he sent to family members and friends. The most extensive correspondence is with his father. The other thread is his narrative account of his life, in the style of a typical memoir. Early in the book, Amis discloses that he no longer identifies with the younger self who wrote most of the letters, whom he names “Osric,” after the naive courtier from Hamlet. He has changed so much since young adulthood that he thinks of himself as a completely different person. Amis attributes this division to his feelings of embarrassment and guilt for the impulsive and naive decisions he made while younger. He was erratic, self-centered, opinionated, and loud, believing that these traits were useful in establishing himself as a modern Renaissance man. He thought of himself as always a little superior to his peers. Amis argues that he had a natural gift for critique that was obscured by these character flaws. He took incisive and scrupulous notes in class.

Leaving the story of Osric behind, Amis turns to the year he entered Oxford. While he was supposed to be studying for the notoriously difficult entrance exam, he squandered his time and money pursuing a relationship with his crush, Rachel. In retrospect, he admits that he was not ready for a relationship. When it came time to take the test, Amis leaned on his enigmatic writing style to impress his test reviewers. He wrote essays on writers including D.H. Lawrence, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, admitting that he belabored his points to obscure the fact that he was not prepared to analyze them. For the final essay, where the prompt was to analyze a word of one’s choosing, he analyzed the word “experience”—a subject that he had, ironically, barely explored in practice. Amis was especially anxious during the interview period. Though he had confidence in his intellectual strengths, he was worried that interviewers would misinterpret his odd styles of analysis and critique. Looking back, he reflects that he probably made it past the interview period and into Oxford just by being himself.



The last section of Amis’s memoir deals with his father’s death. Kingsley Amis was a famous novelist and a role model for the young Martin. When Kingsley’s health began to decline, his ex-wife, Amis’s mother, returned to care for him, along with her new husband. This eclectic combination of people, each bringing a singular personality and transcending the normal boundaries of intimacy, is definitive of Amis’s experience with his family. Amis concludes his memoir by stating that literature’s “great deficiency” is that it cannot prepare one for real life. Because literature can merely imitate experience, or capture it after the experience itself is done, one must primarily rely on experience to understand the world.