Stephen Fry

I love Stephen Fry. I adore the man! And I associate him so strongly with Oscar Wilde it's not even funny. I'm currently listening* to "The Liar".

Fry's first novel. While it's a little hard to follow at times - the timeline/plot jumps around a lot - it is very entertaining and funny.

Fry's hilarious novel has won praise from critics everywhere, and it hit the very top of bestseller lists in England. Its bisexual hero is a diabolically brilliant pathological liar with the wit of a Truman Capote and the moral compunctions of an amoeba.

Also, here's a rendition of Adrian by Lyndsey Wells which I love.

Apparently "The Liar" is partly autobiographical. Which prompted me to look up Fry's actual biography (I'm ashamed to admit it, but I wasn't aware he'd written and published one). Thus, "Moab Is My Washpot" - again, not entirely legally acquired - is sitting on my 'to read' list. I'm reading "Orlando" at the moment, than it's "On Beauty", and then it's "Moab Is My Washpot".

* OK, so I normally don't do audio books, but I just couldn't get my hands on a printed copy of the book. I mean, technically I could, but I'm in some serious financial trouble at the moment, so if Monash university library doesn't have what I want, I go online and just pretty much download whatever I can get. Anyway, Stephen Fry is awesome. I'll (legally) get a copy of "The Liar" when I crawl back up from the rock bottom.

A number one bestseller in Britain that topped the lists there for months, Stephen Fry's astonishingly frank, funny, wise memoir is the book that his fans everywhere have been waiting for. Since his PBS television debut in the Blackadder series, the American profile of this multitalented writer, actor and comedian has grown steadily, especially in the wake of his title role in the film Wilde, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination, and his supporting role in A Civil Action. Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar , and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, ready to start over in a world in which he had always felt a stranger. One of very few Cambridge University graduates to have been imprisoned prior to his freshman year, Fry is a brilliantly idiosyncratic character who continues to attract controversy, empathy and real devotion.

This extraordinary and affecting book has "a tragic grandeur that lifts it to classic status," raved the Financial Times in one of the many ecstatic British reviews. Stephen Fry's autobiography, in turns funny, shocking, sad, bruisingly frank and always compulsively readable, could well become a classic gay coming-of-age memoir.