Good memoir-writing should also be self-critical

A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir of the world going mad around her sparked a memory of my own. It is a couple of days after the Brexit vote, and several hundred of us have gathered in London for the memorial service of a recently departed friend. The ceremony was hardly over before Applebaum and her husband, the former Polish defence minister Radek Sikorski, started picking political fights with the other guests, including some very old friends. ‘Don’t go near Anne and Radek,’ one mutual friend said to me, signalling to the visibly furious couple: ‘They’re absolutely spitting.’

There is a tradition of books by intellectuals recounting their fallouts with their former friends. Applebaum, a former deputy editor of this magazine and justly celebrated historian, frames her memoir with two actual parties: one at her restored mansion in Poland on the eve of the millennium, the second at the same house in the summer of 2019. In the years between she has parted ways with many of the guests at the first celebration. All had been elated by the events of 1989 and hopeful about the post-communist future. Twilight of Democracy is her attempt to explain that divergence of ways. Perhaps predictably, she finds other people to be most at fault.

The book begins with Applebaum’s fallouts in her husband’s native country, as the Polish public rejected his political party and voted in a rival. She then does a whistlestop tour of Hungary and what she believes has gone wrong there. After this we travel to Britain and the Brexit vote, where the ‘Vote Leave campaign proved it was possible to lie, repeatedly, and to get away with it’. Next Spain, where the Vox party is both not in government and not to her taste.