This Much Is True

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Suddenly I am eighty. How can that possibly be? Eighty is OLD! Eighty means maybe five, maybe ten years left. Where did my life go? There’s much I still want to do. What have I learnt? Have I done the best I could? Have I made a difference? Those are the questions that rush at me.

I am writing this book in an attempt to make sense of my life, to take stock. It’s been a full, if chaotic, eighty years. I was born in 1941 at the darkest moment of the war; my parents were convinced that Britain was about to lose. Despite this, the Holocaust and its horrors didn’t really impinge on my childhood; it’s only later I’ve come to realise how powerfully and inescapably that shadow has become part of my life.

Growing up in the post war period, with loving parents, I skipped from moment to moment. I’ve travelled through every continent bar Antarctica, I’ve slept with a curious variety of humans. I entered a precarious profession where a short, fat, Jewish girl with no neck dared to think she could stand on a stage and be successful. I’ve completed over five hundred jobs and relished every minute of them. But have I merely skimmed the surface? Why do I still feel so unsure about things? Might a certain level of uncertainty be a good thing? Complete confidence carries smugness alongside — and I do not want that. Smugness shows on stage; when you can see a performer admiring their delivery of a certain line, it kills the performance stone dead. It’s possible that my insecurity is the very quality that connects me to everyone else. I don’t hide my vulnerability. I don’t know how.

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