“Dancing Fish and Ammonites” by Penelope Lively – A Life of Literature

Penelope Lively is certainly one of the most highly-regarded authors out there, churning out one novel after the next for over fifty years, she has made a name for herself and offered us, the readers, countless hours of informative and insightful entertainment.

However, she has very rarely opened up about her own life and what led her to take the path she has trudged on for decades… very rarely, until she published Dancing Fish and Ammonites, her own memoir.

In this book, Lively treats her own life as a story arc, beginning at the very start with her early childhood, which was spent in Cairo. She details what she remembers of her teenage years, the time spent living in England in a boarding school, the drastic social changes she came to observe, her infatuation with archaeology and its importance in her life, how she set out on the path of the writer, who influenced her, various personal and impersonal events that marked her life, and more. In the end, she reaches the current place she was at when writing the book, that is to say, aging and nearing the end of her rope.

I have to admit, even though Lively certainly had her fair share of interesting things happen to her, the events themselves which transpired throughout her life were, at least for the most part. I found that some of the passages tended to ramble on and on in regards to a menial or simply uninteresting topic (however, this is a matter of personal opinion and should be taken with a grain of salt).

Thankfully though, she chooses to spend most of her pages dwelling on the many things she has come to learn from her journey through life. Naturally, considering where she is now, it was to be expected that many of her reflections relate in one way or another to the concept of aging. Lively does give some eye-opening thoughts about what life really looks like, at least to her, once the last stretch has been reached.

All in all, Dancing Fish and Ammonites is a superbly-written memoir, and though it could benefit from the reduction of outright deletion of a few passages here and there, it still stands strong as a sharp, witty, informative, creative and illuminating look into not only the author’s own life, but that vague and overwhelming thing we like to call “life itself”.

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Penelope Lively Personal site Penelope Lively is a highly-acclaimed British novel who was born in Cairo. Amongst a myriad of different awards she has received the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger in 1987 and the Carnegie Medal for The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Though there are certainly many notable things about her, many see Lively’s trademark as being her flexibility and adaptability at writing for different audiences and within different genres.