Book of the Month: My Family - The Memoir by David Baddiel

David Baddiel is a British comedian and author, known for everything from co-writing the football song Three Lions to multiple TV appearances, and more recently writing a book, Jews Don't Count, addressing anti-semitism. A Cambridge graduate, with a quip for everything, he is one of the best-known faces in our cultural and comic landscape.

Baddiel's most recent book is My Family: The Memoir and it reveals the strange and intriguing home from which he sprang. One of three boys, he grew up in North-West London. His dyspeptic father, Colin, was an engineer turned dealer of Dinky toys. His mother, Sarah, whose family escaped Nazi Germany when she was a baby in 1939, was glamorous, eccentric and very proud to be embroiled in a long-term affair with a man who dealt in golf memorabilia. Wanting to show her love, she entered the same trade and filled the suburban Baddiel home with every kind of golf ephemera known to man.

If the relationship between Mr and Mrs Baddiel was distant, their parenting was even less connected and the book is stuffed with eye-popping examples of what might now pass for neglect, or at least indifference. Both his parents are dead, so he does not feel the need to cover up any of their behaviour. And anyway, as he reminds us repeatedly, "I feel desperately uncomfortable not telling the exact truth, in detail, always." Of course this makes for a wild, jaw-dropping ride through the 60s and 70s of his family life.

And yet, this warts and all book of an eccentric Jewish family is not just laugh-out-funny and occasionally quite gross, but also filled with love and affection. Talking about them as they really were, keeps the memory of his parents alive for Baddiel, and for that readers should be grateful.

Watch our interview with David Baddiel here

David Baddiel is the author of My Family: The Memoir, our Welldoing Book of the Month for July 2024

See previous Book of the Month winners and interviews here