My Days

With a foreword by John Updike

My Days is the only memoir from R.K. Narayan, one of the twentieth century''s most important writers in the English language. This edition includes a foreword by John Updike. In the wryly funny style that has made him famous, R.K. Narayan shares his life story, beginning in his grandmother''s garden in Madras with a ferocious pet peacock. As a young boy with no interest in school he trains grasshoppers and scouts and then, against the advice of all, especially his commanding headmaster father, the dreaming Narayan begins to write fiction. When one of his pieces is accepted by Punch magazine, what he describes as his ''first prestige publication'', his life becomes gradually filled with bumbling British diplomats, strange movie moguls, evasive Indian officials and ''the blind urge'' to fall in love. Like his fiction R.K. Narayan''s memoirs are acutely perceptive of the human condition, often brilliantly funny and always forgiving.