Quartet Books

My autobiography was published in late April, the first of three planned volumes, called ‘Backing Into Light’, this one named ‘My Father’s Son’. It starts with an ante-natal experience which left (as they must all do) a lifelong terror of…the source which produced it. Something I only began to understand late in my life. The book tells of a growing sexual awareness, several erotic encounters stamp one indelibly; in fact I’m pretty sure that all our eroticism is based on the very earliest sensations and sights, even if later we’ve quite forgotten them. I tell of school crushes, both Grammar and Art, the throes of trying to write through adolescence, my national service treating VD my first success, publication of a short story in The London Magazine, my affair with a Brighton vicar, with various literary guys, my first marriage; and takes me to divorce and the terrible fight through the courts for proper access to my son against the charges of homosexuality and drunkenness - then in the sixties considered serious enough to stop me from ever seeing my son ever again. My solicitor at the time said to my wife’s solicitors, ‘You don’t bother to try and stop a heterosexual father from seeing his daughter.’ But all arguments were of no avail then. The book takes me up to my second play, Spitting Image, being performed in the West End and then in New York.

—Colin Spencer on the first volume of his autobiography, Backing into Light: My Father’s Son. Available now!