8 /10 1 Votes
Language English Pages 448 pages Originally published 2 October 1997 Publisher Random House Genre Autobiography | 4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1997 ISBN 0-09-945704-0 Followed by The Fry Chronicles Country United Kingdom | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
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Moab Is My Washpot (published 1997) is Stephen Fry's autobiography, covering the first 20 years of his life. In the book, Fry is candid about his past indiscretions, including stealing, cheating and lying. The book covers some of the same ground as in Fry's first novel, The Liar, published in 1991. In that work, public schoolboy Adrian Healey falls in love with a boy called Hugo Cartwright; in the autobiography, 14-year-old Fry becomes besotted with 13-year-old "Matthew Osborne".
Contents
Fry also writes about his older brother Roger, Bunce (the new boy at his prep school, Stouts Hill), Jo Wood (his best friend at Uppingham), and Oliver Derwent (a prefect who "seduces" Fry).
Title
The title, never explained in the text of the book, is a verse found in Psalm 60 and Psalm 108. Through wearing sandals, people's feet would become filthy in the dusty desert environment and upon entering a home feet would be washed with water by pouring water over them into a washpot. Moab, which had threatened Israel, was to be so completely subdued, and so became likened to a wash pot or basin. This title was selected because Fry saw the book as "scrubbing at the grime of years".
The Oxford English Dictionary gives "moab (n.): 2. Chiefly in English public schools: an outdoor conduit for washing; a tub, trough, or other container for water; a washroom."
Matthew Osborne
In a 2001 article for the Evening Standard, Andrew Bellin wrote that Fry was reunited with "Osborne" after the publication of the book:
Many pages of the deepest purple are devoted to this Matthew Osborne, "the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life". I ask if the pseudonymous Matthew, with whom he eventually achieved some form of splendour in the long grass, had been in touch since the book came out in 1997. He had.
How did he take it? "Very well. He is very happily married with children. A wonderful chap and hugely successful as it happens," Fry chuckles, incredulous. "I think his wife knows because she is extremely friendly to me in a way that suggests to me she knows all about it and is very happy with it. I see him a couple of times a year, I suppose."