Must You Go?: My Life with Harold Pinter »

ANTONIA FRASER is the author of many internation­ally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola, The Wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, and Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the 2000 Norton Medlicott Medal of Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize.

A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser.

In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother of six, and Pinter was married to a distinguished actress. Over the years, they experienced much joy, a shared devotion to their work, crises and laughter, and, in the end, great courage and love as Pinter battled the illness to which he eventually suc­cumbed on Christmas Eve 2008.

Must You Go? is based on Fraser’s recollections and on the diaries she has kept since October 1968. She shares Pinter’s own revelations about his past, as well as observations by his friends. Fraser’s diaries—written by a biographer living with a creative artist and observing the process firsthand—also pro­vide a unique insight into his writing.

Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser lived together from August 1975 until his death thirty-three years later. “O! call back yesterday, bid time return,” cries one of the courtiers to Richard II. This is Antonia Fraser’s uniquely compelling way of doing so.

The Barnes & Noble Review

With the graciousness that no doubt earned her the Sunday Independent headline, "He's grumpy, she smoothes things over," Fraser captures Pinter's sometimes "savage melancholy," his often inflammatory outspokenness, and their remarkably productive lives, filled with work, political activism, family, and many famous acquaintances.

Preface

Part One

1 First Night 3

2 Pleasure and a Good Deal of Pain 20

3 Reader, We Lived Together 34

4 Theatre of the World 49

5 Our Newfoundland 63

6 Open-Boating 79

7 A Super Study 97

8 It Is Here 113

Part Two

9 Writing Images 127

10 Unreasonable but Right? 147

11 Moon over Prague 162

12 Stage Wife 175

13 Marriage - Again 188

14 Moonlight and Ashes 202

15 France: Celebration 222

Part Three

16 The Steps Downward 241

17 The New Dead 259

18 Worst of Times, Best of Times 280

19 Fortitude 298

20 I'll Miss You So Much 313