ALAN CUMMING
FAMILY MATTERS
The toast of Hollywood and Broadway, Alan Cumming is refl ecting on a tough Perthshire upbringing. Yasmin Sulaiman
talks to him about his moving and shocking memoir
‘I think it’s a sad, sad thing that we tend to remember bad things more clearly than we do good things. But actually that’s quite helpful in this case,’ laughs Alan Cumming. The actor and entertainer has just released his new book, Not My Father’s Son, but it’s far from your average celebrity autobiography. Rather, it’s an emotional ‘family memoir’ and is as much about his mother, brother and, crucially, his physically abusive father as it is about the star.
‘When someone famous writes a book about themselves, you think it’s going to be “I was born and blah blah blah and my i rst box ofi ce success blah blah blah”,’ he jokes, speaking to us from the US while promoting the book Stateside. ‘The book is called a memoir in America, but Canongate [his UK publisher] put in the “family” word. I really like that and wish they’d done it here. It confounds your expectations of a celebrity autobiography: I like that. I think that me being famous is a little bit of the story but actually the bulk of it is not connected to that.’ ➙
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