A Sort of Life by Graham Greene

This volume covers Greene’s early life, from mundane childhood in Surrey, through to school and university and on to his early working life as a sub-editor at The Times and his years as a struggling novelist. His memoirs have been criticised for being oddly impersonal and for brushing over his marriage and his conversion to Catholicism, especially as his faith was to become a powerful motif in many of his novels. Despite these omissions he deals frankly with the personal demons he faced in his teens, including an account of several suicide attempts, the resulting psychoanalysis his father arranged for him, and his brief fascination with  Russian Roulette.