Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash
A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash
A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash
Audiobook5 hours

A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash

Written by Alexander Masters

Narrated by Alexander Masters

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

About this audiobook

In 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a bin on a building site in Cambridge, England. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, mysterious diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. The anonymous author, known only as "I," reveals themselves as the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Over five years, the brilliant biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of this secret author, ending with an astounding final revelation.

A biographical detective story that unfolds with the suspense of a mystery-but has all the dazzling originality that made Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards such a beloved book-A Life Discarded is a true, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 18, 2016
ISBN9781515977964
Author

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.

Related to A Life Discarded

Related audiobooks

Literary Biographies For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Life Discarded

Rating: 3.857142742857143 out of 5 stars
4/5

35 ratings6 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Simply 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: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Completely 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 stars
    3/5
    As 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 stars
    3/5
    author 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 stars
    3/5
    148 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 stars
    5/5
    Simply 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.