"An Autobiography," by Agatha Christie … is the work of a writer who depended upon a skeleton—the formal structure of the detective story—in order to allow herself to imagine in public. These memoirs are like nothing else she wrote: they are vivid, stylish, subtle, relaxed, and wholly uncarpentered…. [Mrs. Christie's] tone provides a sense of freshness, of discovery, as if she were inviting us along as she finds out how she came to be who she was. She also demonstrates, by the way, how intense and complex emotions take shape in narrow little societies. Sometimes she justifies the past in ways we cannot accept. For instance, she thinks that late-Victorian parents, like her own, were "realistic" in labelling their children early, and tells us, with no apparent resentment, "I myself was always recognized, though quite kindly, as 'the slow one' of the family." This judgment was nonsense, and I think it harmed her, deepening her shyness, her sense of inadequacy, and her self-distrust, to which she repeatedly refers. Humiliating stagefright ended her aspiration for a career as a concert pianist, and throughout her life she seems to have feared attention, or even admiration. I see a parallel to her published work, which is always tearing along to divert us, as if she feared she might be a bore.

In her memoirs, by contrast, she is candid and ample. She does not conceal trouble (loss of money) or sorrow (loss of love), and she writes freely of her idiosyncrasies, her joys, her pleasures, her sources of pride. Her publishers note that she does not describe what they call her "celebrated disappearance"—an amnesiac flight during the breakup of her first marriage—but she is remarkably precise about the onset of her nervous breakdown, and evokes its peculiar frightfulness: her feelings of loneliness and confusion, of knowing she was somehow "off" but not knowing exactly how or why. And, for once allowing herself the freedom of space, she has room to let character develop. Though she seems to have gone on believing that she was partly to blame for the failure of that marriage, the reader will see, I think, what Mrs. Christie was too self-belittling to recognize: that she was a superior woman married to a mediocre man. The happiness of her second marriage, to a distinguished archeologist, shows her success with a husband who was her equal in brains, character, and taste.

Mrs. Christie's amplitude also offers a fascinating mass of detail about the past—about the shapes of Victorian trunks, say, and the way Edwardian women wore hairpieces. She has a sense of humor, a sense of fun, and a sense of the point of things. No matter how much she appears to digress, she is such a gifted narrator that her story never slackens. It unfolds with an effect of absolute naturalness, which, of course, is never achieved by nature but only by art. During her life, Agatha Christie was recognized as a first-rate entertainer; in this work she reveals the artist she did not believe she was, and was too shy to let herself be. (pp. 105-6)