What Am I Still Doing Here?: My Years as Me

Having written acclaimed biographies of uncompromising and glittering geniuses—including Peter Sellers, Laurence Olivier, and Anthony Burgess—Roger Lewis, rotund, dark, and difficult, has at long last stumbled upon the greatest monster of all—himself

 

It was when Lewis suggested in the press that Agatha Christie was a lesbian that the death threats began. Here, presented for the first time, is a funny and appalling self-portrait, crammed with Lewis's clashes and frustrations, that illuminates the life of the man behind the Evil Fairy. The calamities he describes, such as coming in a pathetic fifth in the Oxford Chair of Poetry Election or throwing a party in what turned out to be a Cornish old peoples' home, are always offset by beautiful riffs—about Seville, a city he can't keep away from; or the train ride from Salzburg to Venice, where he stays in the restaurant car so long he alights in Zagreb by mistake; or the lush flowering magnolias he sees at Agatha Christie's house on the River Dart. Hearing the overture to Iolanthe played on the radio, and his own name mentioned by the announcer, Lewis is conveyed back to his extraordinary Welsh past, where Gilbert & Sullivan was put on in the village hall, and where Roger Lewis knew at once that his destiny was to become Evil Fairy, complete with wand.