Experience (Martin Amis) Experience (Martin Amis) Experience is a book of memoirs by the British author Martin Amis. The book was written primarily in response to the 1995 death of Amis's father, the famed author Kingsley Amis, and was first published in 2000. Upon publication, "Experience" was serialized in the U.K.s "The Guardian" in four parts. Critical response to Amis's memoir was very warm. The critic James Wood wrote in the "Guardian", ""Experience" is a beautiful, and beautifully strange book, and it is unlike anything one expected. One feared a trough of plaint: either a sad, Gosse-like reckoning with the father; or an
Kingsley Amis a pattern which was the inverse of that of his close friend Philip Larkin. Before becoming known as a poet, Larkin had published two novels; Amis, on the other hand, originally wished to be a poet, and turned to writing novels only after publishing several volumes of verse. He continued throughout his career to write poetry, which is known for its typically straightforward and accessible style, yet often masks a nuance of thought, for example, in "Bookshop Idyll" or "Against Romanticism", just as it does in his novels. Amis's first novel, "Lucky Jim" (1954), is perhaps his most famous, satirizing