Moab is My Washpot - Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry's fiction is like the man himself, at least as he appears to the casual-but-interested observer - wry, amusing, quintessentially English, somewhat self-conscious, unquestionably self-deprecating and disturbingly intelligent. This, the autobiography of his first two decades, is no different, though it's also illuminating, a little distressing, and surprisingly honest.
In Moab (a title I'd love to be able to explain without recoursing to Wikipedia, but my - expensive enough - education clearly left gaps of erudition filled by Fry's upbringing), he details his childhood, the lack of trauma of being sent off to boarding school as a young child, his long-held and deeply-rooted fears and anxieties, the shock of secondary school, his growing realisation that he was gay, and how (though not so much why) he went off the rails entirely and disappeared with a stolen credit card.
Sprinkled through the autobiography are (mostly) relevant and (always) interesting essays on a variety of topics, including a dispelling of the strongly held belief that gay sex is both unnatural and all about buggery, an explanation of why it's not distressing to go off to boarding school when it's the norm for everyone your know, and why our imperfections (like his broken nose) are important. He also describes the cockiness of intelligent youth (and my vocabulary is now enriched with the words pleonasm, as well as being replenished with the known-but-lost sesquepedilianism and prolix), the inculcation of U and non-U behaviour (including the appropriate pronunciation of such words as Monday and interesting, and the eschewment of serviette and mirror).
It's thanks to Moab that I now know Alexander Graham Bell once said "I do not think I am exaggerating the possibilities of this invention when I tell your that it is my firm belief that one day there will be a telephone in every major town in America."
Most of all, Fry beautifully and exquisitely captures the torment and tortures of childhood, from those that reverberate throughout our adulthoods to those that are wholly forgotten until we're reminded of them years later. Like Fry I wrote letters to myself to be opened by my older self, complete with stern admonishments that were embarrassing in retrospect, and pilfered petty cash from my parents (though never whole credit cards from hosts when I was a house guest). I could never write as well as Fry, but if I could this is what I'd want to write. - Alex