Praise for Try Me
Highly Dramatic Reading
"Try Me, should really be called Take No Prisoners..[A] riveting story of how a troubled child became a Chanel-clad sex-bomb socialite quasi-criminal and then a somewhat contrite mother and very promising writer. The story of this world-class drama queen makes for highly dramatic reading."
- Michael Gross, More Intelligent Life
Explosive and compelling
"this is a brilliantly written life story. Who hasn't Farah Damji met on the dark side of London glittery media life and the New York arts and fashion worlds? She doesn't pull her punches and doesn't spare herself. One of my books of the year."
- Madame Arcati, celebrity and media biz blogger
and commentator
"At last an immigrant autobiography without a mission to complain.
A fresh and fearless voice"
- Farrukh Dhondy, author of Bombay Duck and Adultery
Casually shocking.
Artfully bizarre.
" The most jaw-dropping memoir I've read since Jeffrey Archer's prison diaries"
- Guy Adams, The Independent
This book is a landmark
"An exhilarating breath of fresh air: an Indian woman who has lived, loved, f**ked and f**ked-up in spectacular fashion and has the guts and talent to write about it with honesty and style. This book is a landmark, throwing down a gauntlet that Arundhati Roy,
Kiran Desai et al would never dare pick up."
- Nirpal Dhariwal, author Tourism
The Synopsis
This is a story which starts in Uganda and is told through the eyes of a child. We follow her journey to England, prior to Idi Amin's forced Exodus and the angst of being the only non-white child in an English private school. While her parents are busy building their empire, the writer finds her identity is shaped by her experiences, rather than her culture to which she only had loose ties. A difficult adolescence sees her leave home as soon as she is legal at 18, to travel to New York where she is part of high society and lives a glamorous life. Ultimately the "guest shaped hole" inside her expands and swallows her up, she ventures down a path of self-destruction. Her life becomes entangled within the social set of boldface gossip column names and the shadowy world of New York's underworld and drug abuse, and she ends up in the notorious New York prison, Rikers' Island. Farah comes back to London in 1995 and restarts her life but the ingrained urge to self-annihilate leads her to make ridiculous choices, commit crimes and go astray again. From becoming an important, emerging voice in British media, she ends up in prison for twenty one months for charges including perverting the course of justice and theft. Friends and family become enemies, enemies become allies and lovers; nothing in life or in the version of her story, which was followed by the international media is what it seems."The truth" she says "is just an agreed upon set of lies." Try Me - a powerful tale of sex, lies and culture. Never self-pitying or indulgent, this is a modern woman's journey to reclaim her self and her life. At times funny, moving and sad, it's been described as "everyone's journey to defy stereotypes about who we need to be."
It has been noted Farah sabotaged her own efforts; she seemed to declare that even self-destruction was her own prerogative, since self-destructiveness is the final assertion of absolute individuality. Farah is a coloured woman living the anti-coloured woman’s life. In doing so, she demonstrates that both white and coloured remain imprisoned in public, antiquated definitions of who we must be as individuals. As such, her narrative has the power to set everyone free everywhere. Male. Female. Non-criminal.
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"The aphorist Christopher Spranger wrote: “The author who possesses not only ideas of his own but eloquence with which to clothe and adorn them cannot avoid cutting an impudent figure in this world.” Spranger might have been describing Farah Damji when he wrote those words. For she is such an author, creative, eloquent, and most definitely impudent. And it’s the impudence that makes her memoir Try Me so delightful to read....And oh! What life she led. The kind of life only a very few women have lived. Women like Cleopatra of Egypt, the Queen of Sheba, Theodora, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marilyn Monroe. Women who had style, imagination, elan and a lust for life." - Randall Radic, retired priest and author
Read more part 1: Read more part 2