The Book Depository Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright
609 ratings
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Price: £12.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Spilling the Beans : Paperback : Hodder & Stoughton : 9780340933893 : 0340933895 : 01 Jan 2009 : The number one bestselling, no holds barred autobiography of one of the nations best-loved cookswhose lifehas led her from wealth and privilege to alcoholism, bankruptcy and eventually fame in Two Fat Ladies. The Book Depository Spilling the Beans by Clarissa Dickson Wright - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780340933893
MPN: 0340933895
GTIN: 9780340933893
Author: Book Lover
Rating: 5
Review: What a roller-coaster of a ride this book is. CDW has certainly packed an awful lot into her life and recounts it with humour, honesty and colour. It is vivid book full of highs and lows. Without giving too much away, she only became a barrister to spite her father and fell into alcoholism after the death of her mother. Her addiction cost her dearly - she was a millionaire but blew it on drink and partying. A doctor believed that she must have had malaria because her adrenal gland had been destroyed by quinine, but no, it had been the quinine in the tonic she put in her gin! This is not a bland, celebrity autobiography. It is a memorable book and one that I'm sure I'll read again. By the way, if you are interested in books about barristers and/or fantastic true stories, the best autobiography I've read in this genre is Animal QC: My Preposterous Life, by Gary Bell QC. If you like Spilling The Beans, you'll love Animal QC - the story of a man from a very poor background making the way to the top of his profession (despite being homeless for years, getting a criminal conviction and spending time as a football hooligan).
Author: Dr Rich Boden
Rating: 3
Review: For an edited book, vs self-published, this is chock-full of errors of people’s names, years, location names etc - cursory googling will find most of them. There are errors from Clarissa’s viewpoint e.g. espousing a theory of what causes alcoholism that was already 10+ years disregarded when she wrote this and I can find no evidence whatsoever for the quinine-induced condition she claimed to have actually existing - it is not cinchonism’s normal symptoms. Members of her family have questioned the validity of some things written about her father herein - I cannot comment on those of course and since Clarissa shuffled off this mortal coil, we will simply never know. That said, it IS entertaining and a good memoir (if not an autobiography sensu stricto) and certainly something anyone with addiction issues will find useful in some way. An alcoholic myself and almost 13 years sober, I did not use a 12-step programme as I didn’t agree with a lot of the framing of alcoholism and addiction by those programmes but it evidently worked for Clarissa and I’m glad she had 20+ good, happy, drink-free years of writing, book-selling, catering and television work in her later life, particularly after how low she had become in the 1980s.
