Stephen Fry has a respectable number of fans in the United States, but his popularity here is nothing like it is in England, where he's a cultural icon to which there's no precise American counterpart. Among his many accomplishments: he's an actor, a television presenter, a newspaper columnist, a public intellectual and a novelist. (Actually, with more than three million Twitter followers, he may be the most popular novelist on the Internet.) The Fry Chronicles picks up where the first volume of his biography, Moab Is My Washpot (1997), left off, and though it covers only eight years, what amazing years they are.
After a troubled childhood, including imprisonment, Fry took the entrance exams to Cambridge in 1980 and won a scholarship. He starts at the hallowed halls as a gay, bipolar, awkward young man in fear of being "found out" as some kind of fraud, setting the tone for the stories to come. He loves words, the "luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them." We read about him meeting Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson; they begin writing and acting out skits in the Cambridge Footlights troupe and turn out a successful revue called The Cellar Tapes, which is aired by the BBC the following year. He's hired to rewrite the 1930s musical Me and My Girl and it's a success; then he's invited to join the cast of the hit sitcom Blackadder.
In the telling of these stories, he's very generous to others yet fairly harsh on himself, the blunt honesty tempered by his understated, dryly witty, conversational voice. The book ends on a dark note, with him snorting cocaine, and many of his biggest achievements--including his most popular television collaborations with Laurie--yet to come. That's a sequel anyone who reads The Fry Chronicles will eagerly await. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher