[Daphne du Maurier] has chosen to use whole portions of her girlhood diaries [in "Myself When Young"], verbatim, to gird her memory. The result is a gently gushing prose, full of exuberant clichés and heedless adverbs ("The tide of adolescence was running at full spate" and "This beauty is too much. It's defeating, utterly bewildering, Beauty most exquisite…. Somehow profoundly unhappy" …). (p. 18)

If the memoir would have benefited from less wholesale use of diaries, it surely would have gained from the excision of numbers of her early, jejune poetry. There is also much conventional foreshadowing of events ("There were so many stories waiting to be written. Perhaps one day …").

I suppose what I would have liked is to hear the mature successful novelist remembering her youth in her mature voice, suggesting the sources of her fiction in full detail instead of dropping tantalizing hints about it, and...