Folk Music Ken Tucker Can Stand.

DATE June 6, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Novelist Martin Amis
discusses his new book titled "Experience," and his relationship with his father, the late
Kingsley Amis

TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Martin Amis is a member of England's most famous writing families. He's best
known for his novels "Money," "London Fields" and "The Information." The last
two were best-sellers in the States. His father, Kingsley Amis, is best known
for his satirical novel, "Lucky Jim." Kingsley wrote social satires and was
known for his caustic wit and curmudgeonly personality. He was knighted in
1990, five years before his death. Now Martin Amis has written a memoir about
being a writer who is the son of a writer. It's called "Experience." Let's
start with a reading from the opening chapter.

Mr. MARTIN AMIS (Author, "Experience"): `I am a novelist trained to use
experience for other ends. Why should I tell the story of my life? I do it
because my father is dead now, and I always knew I would have to commemorate
him. He was a writer, and I am a writer. It feels like a duty to describe
our case, a literary curiosity which is also just another instance of a
father and a son. This will involve me in the indulgence of certain bad
habits--name-dropping is unavoidably one of them. But I've been indulging
that habit in a way ever since I first said, `Dad.' I do it because I feel
the same stirrings that everyone else feels. I want to set the record
straight--so much of this is already public--and to speak for once without
artifice, though not without formality.

The trouble with life, the novelist will feel, is its amorphousness, its
ridiculous fluidity. Look at it, thinly plotted, largely themeless,
sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least
violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationless. And
it's always the same beginning and the same ending. My organizational
principles, therefore, derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist's
addiction to seeing parallels and making connections. The method plus these
footnotes to preserve the collateral thought should give a clear view of the
geography of a writer's mind. If the effect sometimes seems staccato,
tangential, stop-go, etc., then I can only say that's what it's like on my
side of the desk. But I do it because it is being forced on me. I have seen
what perhaps no writer should ever see--the place in the unconscious where my
novels come from. I couldn't have stumbled on it unassisted, nor did I. I
read about it in the newspaper.'

GROSS: Martin Amis, what do you mean by that last line about reading about in
the newspaper?

Mr. AMIS: I had an affair with a married woman in the mid-'70s and she later
led me to understand that the daughter--the two-year-old daughter she had was,
in fact, mine. And I believed her because I took the photograph she gave me
of this little girl to my mother and said, `What do you think, Mom?' And she
held it--the photograph at various distances from her eyes and then said
without looking up, `Definitely.' When this became public about 20 years
later--18 years later, there was a great deal about it in the newspapers. And
the novelist Maureen Duffy wrote a piece saying that if you look at my novels
you can see that from this date on in the mid-'70s, my novels became quietly
obsessed with missing children, threatened children, misattributed children,
vulnerable children.

And when I read it, I felt completely defeated by this piece. I thought--I
felt, as it were, busted by this piece. It seemed to me self-evidently true.
And no novelist--you know, you don't--what you write about comes from what's
at the back of your mind, not at its forefront. You write about what you--the
things you don't know you're worrying about. And it was clear to me that I
had been worrying about her, thinking about her. And I was consoled, in fact,
because it meant that I had, in a very--in the deepest way possible for me,
had been with her in spirit far more than I knew. But it was a great shock to
be--to have your unconscious laid out for you like that.

GROSS: Were you grateful to the reviewer for pointing this out to you?

Mr. AMIS: It goes beyond gratitude. It's awe or distress. It was just
something unanswerable. And it was only actually half the picture, because I
realized also that I'd been worrying about someone else. In 1973, a few weeks
after my first novel was published, in fact, my cousin--my mother's sister's
child--disappeared, and for 21 years, no one knew what had happened to her.
And then it was revealed roundabout the same time as the identity of my
daughter--when I came to meet my daughter--that she had been murdered and her
body had been exhumed from the basement of Frederick West's house in
Gloucester, and--he being one of the most prolific serial murderers in English
history.

GROSS: It was your missing cousin's body that was found?

Mr. AMIS: Yes. Yeah. So the combination of these two events, I realized
that this had--this had constituted the silent anxiety at the back of my mind
when I wrote all those novels.

GROSS: Now do you ever worry that sometimes even the best kind of
psychoanalysis of a writer's motivations might be a little reductionist?

Mr. AMIS: Oh, yeah. I mean, all that stuff is zero rudimentary and trite
and boring. And I agree with Nabokov who says that he rejects the whole world
of Freud with its vicious embryos spying on the love lives of its parents.
No, it's all humiliating and simple. And I would never in a million years go
to a psychiatrist. But, you know, some things your body just accepts as true,
and this was one of them.

GROSS: But as the creator of characters, are you interested in psychological
explanations or explorations of their character?

Mr. AMIS: Well, I think--I wrote somewhere that, you know, if you're a
moralist--and I said this kind of ironically--I said, `If you're a moralist,
you can't go too far in anyone's past, no matter how atrocious they are as
people, because if you do, then--and this would be a terrible journey, you
know, in a terrible bus with terrible stops for terrible snacks. And you go
back on this journey back into their past, and then you would find the
justification for their wrongdoing and everything would be understood and
everything would, therefore, be forgiven in a way.' And if you're a moralist,
you can't do that. I'm not a moralist in a sense, although every writer must
be. What I mean is that you can't accuse anyone of anything if you go back
far enough, because all is explained.

GROSS: Martin Amis is my guest. He's written a new memoir called
"Experience."

You say in your memoir that you've said in the past that the present phase of
Western literature is `higher autobiography, intensely self-inspecting' and
that this phase began with confessionalism in American poetry. And you say
we're in this phase where it's no more stories, the author is increasingly
committed to the private being. Have you thought of this as a bad thing? I
mean, that sounds like a pretty critical way of looking at autobiography or
autobiographical fiction, and now you've written a memoir.

Mr. AMIS: I'm suspicious of that term. I don't like the emphasis on the
personality. But I'm also susceptible to it, and I feel the same stirrings,
as I said, as everyone else. You know, I wrote this book because I came
across a natural break in my life. And as I say, I always knew I'd have to
write about my father in a kind of pro bono spirit because of the--I say
modesty--rarity, but, in fact, uniqueness of our case. I've always had
difficulty keeping myself--stopping myself from intervening between my novels
and my readers. There's too much me already and now I'm adding to that. But
I still felt I had not choice, and I had to do it.

GROSS: You feel you couldn't have written a memoir if your father was still
alive, or just that you wouldn't have wanted to?

Mr. AMIS: I wouldn't have wanted to. No, it was always going to be
posthumous where he was concerned. It would have been embarrassing. I mean,
I couldn't have faced him over the dinner table if I was writing about him
while he was alive.

GROSS: What were your father's rules--and by the way, my guest is Martin Amis
and his father is the late writer Kingsley Amis. What was your father's rules
about speaking of or writing about family--speaking of family in public or
writing about them?

Mr. AMIS: I don't think he had rules. I don't think he or I had rules. I
think you're guided by your instinct and your sensitivity. There's no point
in having rules in the publicity age where the rules are broken by others, you
know, every day. It would be, you know, frigid and meaningless to just step
back from this. So he talked, actually often mischievously, to the press
about me, for instance, and would be quite scathing about the next generation
of writers. In his memoirs, he tended to stay away from personal things, but
his novels, though, you know, as I came to understand were not
autobiographical, but they were about how he was feeling. You know, it's like
a damage report or a, you know, thermometer reading to read someone's novels.
You see what--the state of their spirit and that's evident, you know,
throughout his corpus.

GROSS: Your father wrote a memoir. What was in it about you? Did you the
book to learn more about how he felt about you?

Mr. AMIS: Of course, I wrenched it open and looked at the index first to see
where I appeared. No, I make little walk-on appearances in his memoirs. But
he called that book an allography, i.e., writing about others, and steered
clear of personal stuff, I think, to preserve it for the fiction.

GROSS: Now you say that your father was always honest about his literary
opinions, and one of the things he said about you that's been quoted a lot is
that you had a terrible compulsive vividness in your style. He said he can't
even finish reading your novels and quote, "It goes back to one of Martin's
heroes, Nabokov. I lay it all at his door, that constant demonstrating of his
command of English." What was your reaction when you read that? I mean, on
the one hand, your father felt he needed to always be honest about his
feelings about books. On the other hand, he could've spared you by saying
that he's your father and not your reviewer and he doesn't have to offer
public opinions about your writing.

Mr. AMIS: But he was incapable of fudging an opinion when it came to
writing, and I always knew that about him and understood that about him. He
thought basically--and he made it clear to me, too--privately he said, you
know, `I think you're the best of a bad lot.'

GROSS: Well, that's high praise.

Mr. AMIS: Yeah, well, it is. And actually the highest praise he ever--when
we were talking about the rarity of our case, he said, `A father and son who
are both some good,' he said. But--and I was very moved to hear that because
that was high praise coming from him. But the big difference between him and
me is that he was a poet as well as a novelist and I'm just a novelist. So
that all the things that you might reserve for your poetry, in his case, all
his thoughts about the spirit and the soul and intense and careful use of
words, all that goes into my prose, because there's no other channel for it.
And that really is the central difference between us.

GROSS: My guest is Martin Amis. His new memoir is called "Experience."
We'll talk more after our break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Martin Amis, and he's written a new memoir called
"Experience." And the book is in part about his father, the late writer
Kingsley Amis.

Your father had a lot of phobias, including fear of being alone, fear of
heights. What were some of the other driving phobias?

Mr. AMIS: Flying, trains, lifts--though he had a rich array of phobias, which
I haven't inherited so far.

GROSS: Have not?

Mr. AMIS: Have not, no.

GROSS: It's funny that a man with such strong opinions would be so timid when
facing a train or just being alone.

Mr. AMIS: I know. And I was thinking back the other day to being in New
York. We spent a year in America when I was a child--when I was nine--and we
came to New York for the day and went up to the top of the Empire State
Building. And I was in awe of this great blithering immensity great beneath
me and was very puzzled when my mother said--or my father said, actually--on
this occasion he said that it was only the presence of his children that
stopped him from screaming when he on top of the Empire State Building. That
was--it was puzzling and a bit disturbing, but the great thing about parents
and children if all is well in the heart is that you completely accept and you
give it a minute's thought and then you just accept it--you just accept your
parents, you accept your children. That's the key to it.

GROSS: You know, another thing I find so paradoxical about your father's
phobias is that he's somebody who appears to have been so critical of other
people and yet so needy for them.

Mr. AMIS: Is that a contradiction? I think it's all of the piece--Don't
you?--that you might--the fact that you need people around might make
you--might build up a certain kind of resentment at your own weakness.

GROSS: But what about at their own weaknesses? I mean, there was other
people he was so critical of.

Mr. AMIS: Well, he was critical in his letters and utterances. But, you
know, what would you have him do? He was--we prize our writers for their
candor. I wouldn't want him any--I wouldn't--you know, he didn't get on with
my stuff particularly, but I wouldn't want him to fudge it and pretend that he
did. That's what writers are for, to tell the truth as they see it.

GROSS: How old were you when your parents divorced?

Mr. AMIS: Thirteen.

GROSS: You write a little bit about their divorce and then you write about
your own divorce when you were--What?--in your early 40s?

Mr. AMIS: Yes, mid-40s.

GROSS: And you say that your father wrote that `stopping being married to
someone is an incredibly violent thing to let happen to you.' And you thought
about that a lot during your divorce. Were your circumstances similar? Did
you both each leave your wives or visa versa?

Mr. AMIS: Well, in fact, I don't write very much at all about my own divorce
and, you know, don't really want to talk about it. One of the great subjects
of the novel has been marriage. And, you know, what I have to say about the
process of being divorced will go to the back of my mind and I'll worry about
it and in a few years I'll write a novel that will have something to do with
it. You select your material when you're writing something like this by
thinking about the feelings of others. And I know my ex-wife wouldn't want me
to write about it, and that was enough for me. And having felt that, I
wouldn't want to write about it either.

GROSS: Oh, well, fair enough. Another thing you do say in your memoir is
that only to your father could you confess how terrible you felt, how
physically terrible, bemused, sub-normalized, stupefied from within during
this period of divorce. `Only to him could I talk about what I was doing to
my children because he had done it to me.' Could you talk a little bit about
if he was able to--if he was helpful to you, if you were able to talk with him
about your feelings about his divorce and...

Mr. AMIS: Yeah. That was--I mean it seems to me that the great--the real
violence of divorce is what you are doing to your children. And what that is,
simply put, is making them distrustful of love, making them think, `Well,
you'd better not love anyone utterly because things can change.' And that's
their first lesson in the fragility of love. And, you know, they're gonna get
that lesson in the end anyway, but it's an awful thing to inflict it on them.
And my father--I could talk about it with my father and he was in his 70s and,
in fact, you know, only had two or three more years to live. But he really
stirred himself and was a great friend to me during that time. And he used to
say, `Talk as much about it as you want or as little about it as you want.'
And that was his last fatherly duty to me. He rounded the circle. You know,
he had done the same to me, he had made me distrustful of love and perhaps
weakened my capacity to love. But he repaired it, you know, inasmuch as he
could in his last years. It was his last fatherly duty.

GROSS: Martin Amis. He'll be back in the second-half of the show. His new
memoir is called "Experience." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Funding credits given)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, Martin Amis talks about the death of his father, the writer
Kingsley Amis. And rock critic Ken Tucker reviews new CDs by two performers,
singer/songwriter Slade Cleaves and guitarist Gurf Morlix.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with British novelist Martin
Amis, author of "Money," and the best sellers "London Fields" and "The
Information." He's written a new memoir about being a writer who is the son
of a famous writer. His father, Kingsley Amis, is best known for the novel
"Lucky Jim," and for his caustic wit. He was knighted in 1990, five years
before his death.

You write about your mother that your mother had a breakdown in 1963 which
culminated in an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. She said she'd been
depressed because she was still in love with your father. You say in 1995
your mother was still contemplating death as an escape from her feelings about
your father, but an escape in the opposite direction. What do you mean?

Mr. AMIS: Well, she said--she--you know, my parents divorced, my mother
remarried, and then remarried again. My father remarried. And then when his
second wife left him, they set up a kind of menage, where my mother and her
third husband, to whom she's still very happily married, moved in and kind of
looked after my father and acted as housekeepers for him. But my father was
always difficult, and later on was impossible and later on than that was
unbelievable. And my mother, you know, blowing the hair off her forehead,
would say, `You know, I've been dying for a heart attack for years,' because
looking after Kingsley was such hard work. So that's what I meant by escaping
in the opposite direction.

GROSS: That's a really surprising relationship. I'm almost surprised she was
willing to do that.

Mr. AMIS: She didn't have a choice, really. It was forced on her, because
she and her husband had very little money, and my father had money but needed
people. So my brother and I kind of, you know, thought this was an obvious,
if temporary, solution. We thought it might last six months. In fact, it
lasted for 12 years, until his death. But, you know, they're weird
arrangements for weird people. They were always Bohemians, and so a Bohemian
solution was the good one.

GROSS: So he paid your mother to take care of him and live in the house.

Mr. AMIS: That's right, yeah. With--my mother--they had the garden flat
below, my mother, stepfather and my half-brother, little Hymie(ph), and
Kingsley had the floor above, and they had a communal floor above that. And
somehow, it worked.

GROSS: Well, it made it easier for you to visit both your parents at the same
time.

Mr. AMIS: Yeah, it was very good for the children. It killed two birds with
one stone, in all sorts of senses.

GROSS: Martin Amis is my guest. He's a novelist who's written a new memoir
called "Experience."

Your father, the writer Kingsley Amis, lost much of his memory before he died.
I mean, your father was so much about memory, memory being transformed into
fiction, and I'm sure you've thought a lot about the meaning of memory,
watching your father lose his, and lose certain words in the process, too.

Mr. AMIS: Oh, no, it was very much--the losing of the words was even more
dramatic, and losing humor. And that was the truly devastating thing about
his death, was that--you know, he has a character say in one of his novels,
`The rewards of being sane are not many, but knowing what's funny is one of
them.' And he didn't--towards the end of his--you know, in his last months,
he didn't know what was funny. He couldn't find words. It was all closing
down, the whole operation, the great engine of comedy that he'd been was
winding down, and it was like something out of a novel in that it was--it
measured up, it had symmetry. You know, here was this man whose whole life
had been devoted to words and their comic possibilities, and he'd become a
kind of anti-Kingsley.

After he died--and in his last months, as I say, he was reduced to common
places and tautologies and the simplest forms of, you know, communication.
After he died, I was given a typescript of a book he'd written in his last
year or so called "The King's English," which is about language and grammar
and usage. And it almost gave me a heart attack, because it was--here was my
father's voice again, and, in fact, it's one of his best books. It's almost a
memoir in itself about his love of language, and the ways language can make
you laugh, and it was published posthumously.

GROSS: There's so many parallels between your life and your father's life, in
part, because he was a writer, you're a writer. What did his death, after the
loss of so much memory, make you think about facing your own death and
possibly, you know, being so transformed in the process, transformed like he
was?

Mr. AMIS: Well, chiefly terror, of course. And...

GROSS: Yes. Right.

Mr. AMIS: ...every time I, you know, stumble over a word or can't remember
how to spell something, I think it's starting. But parents--this is
particularly true, perhaps, of fathers and sons--I mean, they teach you not
with catechisms, or, you know, little lessons, they teach you by example. And
they even, as it turns out, teach you how to die. I think Socrates said the
task of philosophy is learning how to die. A big lesson in that is sitting
beside your father's hospital bed and watching him do it.

GROSS: Well, what about the way he did it made you feel that he was teaching
you something by example that you wanted to know?

Mr. AMIS: His great friend, the poet Larkin, said--another death-obsessed
writer--said that being brave while you die means not scaring others. And,
you know, I think that was the great lesson. My father had not much control
over his behavior and the things he said as he was dying, but he did a pretty
good job of not scaring his children. There were some very alarming moments,
and always great suspense when you went to see him during those weeks. But he
somehow managed that and died well.

GROSS: But I think one of the scary things is just watching somebody be so
transformed before death; watching them be a different person because they
don't have memory anymore. That's scary enough.

Mr. AMIS: Oh, it's very scary. And one of the hospitals he was at, the door
to his room had a little glass window set into it, and I, like all his
visitors I'm sure, would peer in through that glass as if at a TV screen to
get a kind of a trailer of what lay in store for you. Because, you know, you
had absolutely no idea of what was going to happen in the next--during your
visit. And you would take a deep breath and in you would go. But, again, as
I said earlier, acceptance is what marks the filial and parental relationship,
and so even in extremis, you would accept it.

GROSS: When your father was dying, you say that you told yourself what you'd
always told yourself, is what all writers have always told themselves,
consciously or otherwise, the things you feel are universal. Now did that
reminder to yourself that the things you were feeling were universal--was that
an attempt to help you deal with your feelings, knowing that they were
universal? Or is that more about writing what you were feeling, feeling
that...

Mr. AMIS: No, it was a moral worry really because the death of a father is a
complex event. It's not just, you know, feeling sad and it's--I describe the
feeling when I was told by my mother that he was going to die 'cause till
quite late on we thought he would persist, you know, sort of damaged way, for
some years. And it felt like I was about to levitate. A sense of impending
levitation; a rise up off the ground. And I thought that expressive and,
again, a complex reaction because you are coming into your own when your
father dies. And, of course, you want him to live forever. And I can boast,
and my brother and sister can boast, that we had no regrets when he died. We
wanted him to live forever, but we'd had our time with him. We'd said the
words to him. There was nothing left unsaid. There were no bitternesses. So
it was all--that was all clear.

But to bring in Freud and his vicious embryos again, Freud says that the death
of a father makes--it's partly chemical I suppose--that floods you with
endorphines to get you through the experience. And you feel full of energy
and ready for work. And, you know, there are books to be written, there are
children to be raised. It's only afterwards that you get--you know, for the
rest of your life, you are repairing the damage done, the grief inflicted, by
the loss of a father. It's--you lose a part of yourself and you never get
over that. And--but the actual business of the father dying is not a simple
one of grief. It's--you feel this guilty energy and sort of spring in your
step because you're stepping forward; you're evolving; you're going on to the
next stage.

GROSS: My guest is Martin Amis. His new memoir is called "Experience." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is novelist Martin Amis, who's written a new memoir, which is
called "Experience." And the book is, in part, about his relationship to his
father, the late writer Kingsley Amis.

You say in your memoir, `I used to give the midlife crisis little credit and
no respect. It was the preserve of various dunces and weaklings.' So what
was your midlife crisis about?

Mr. AMIS: Oh, don't ask.

GROSS: Oh. I think I just did.

Mr. AMIS: Well, the midlife crisis is something you ought to have I think.
It is critical to have a midlife crisis. And if you don't have one, then
that's a crisis. It's facing up to all sorts of structural things in your
life that haven't yet been faced. And chief among them is a new alignment, a
new accession to death. You know, I say that youth can, perhaps, be defined,
and you see it in the very young everywhere you look, as a sense of
immortality, invulnerability. That's why the young are fearless, because they
can't believe in their own death. They're not scheduled to believe in it.
But when you get around 40, it's a full-time job looking the other way, and
you have to turn and look away from this fake, illusory immortality, and you
have to turn your head and look at mortality. And you want to have a crisis
about that.

GROSS: What kind of change in behavior did that lead you to?

Mr. AMIS: Well, in my case, it involves the break up of my marriage, a
health crisis having to do with my teeth. And it also involved--you know,
included the death of a father.

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

Mr. AMIS: So it was pretty thorough going.

GROSS: The health crisis you refer to had to do with your teeth--abscesses; I
think a tumor that they found.

Mr. AMIS: Yeah.

GROSS: A lot of pain over a long period of time; a lot of complex dental
surgery and teeth replacement and so on. Pain in the--the mouth is a very
central location for pain. It's hard to distract yourself when you have pain
in your mouth.

Mr. AMIS: That's where you live.

GROSS: It's where you live. It's where you speak. It's where you eat. It's
where you kiss. It's where you breath sometimes.

Mr. AMIS: Indeed. And, in fact, they made a model of the human body
entirely scaled to nerve ends. And the result was an incredible little midget
with an enormous lip, Mick Jagger mouth. No, it is--if something's going on
in there, then that's where you live. And, you know, that's partly what I
meant by facing up to things you haven't faced because I had, you know, ceased
to go to the dentist. I'd let it become a kind of complex obsession. And,
you know, dealing with that was certainly part of my crisis.

GROSS: What did you figure out about things that you could do that you were
capable of doing with pain, and things that were just impossible to even
consider when you were in pain?

Mr. AMIS: Pain was always--you know, the toothache is the kind of civilian
limit of pain. And I--you know, I just howled my way through that, but what I
hated more was the fact that I'd have to do something about it.

GROSS: Do you think you became very unpleasant when you were in a lot of
pain?

Mr. AMIS: Did I become unpleasant?

GROSS: Uh-huh. I think it's easy to become unpleasant when you're very
uncomfortable.

Mr. AMIS: Well, Sam Johnson said, `It is so very difficult for a sick man
not to be a scoundrel,' quoted by Brenda Maddox in her "Life of D.H.
Lawrence." You know, D.H. Lawrence perhaps being the worst behaved writer of
all time. And there's a lot in that. You know, he never took a breath
without pain and without an intimation of mortality, and died at 44. It is
difficult for a sick not to be a scoundrel, but I don't think--it made me
feel, actually--on the contrary, I kept thinking, `Christ, I've got to stop
being nice to people.' It had more that effect. Because you need them. You
need their sympathy and...

GROSS: Right. I want to get back to something you mentioned at the beginning
of our talk, which you write about some in the book. And that is that you
found out that you had fathered somebody who you were in a relationship with
years ago. I think you said the child was two when you found out.

Mr. AMIS: Yes.

GROSS: But the story was made public about 18 years later. What kind of
relationship, if any, did you decide to have with the daughter that you found
out after the fact that you fathered?

Mr. AMIS: I didn't decide to have a relationship. We met and fell in love.
And I have a wonderfully warm and candid relationship with her, Delilah(ph).
And it's been not just easy, but wonderful. And I--when her other father
wrote to me, saying that, `Delilah now knows that I'm not her father, that you
are,' I said--I was very shocked by the letter, because I realized, as he
said, `It's been in the back of your mind, no doubt,' and that's exactly where
it had been. But I said to my wife--I showed her the letter and she read it.
And I said, `There's absolutely no reason--Is there?--why this shouldn't be a
wonderful thing.' And she said straight away, `None.' And, you know, she was
a key figure, my wife, and Delilah's other father, Patrick, was a key figure.
And you can imagine all sorts of things that might have gone wrong in the
periphery there, but our relationship has just been, you know, a warm breeze.
And it--you know, love flowed and was soon declared, and, you know, why would
it not?

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. AMIS: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Martin Amis has written a new memoir called "Experience."

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