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 his life. This was one of the main contributory factors in the breakdown of his first marriage. A famous photograph of a sleeping Amis on a Yugoslav beach shows the slogan (written by wife Hilly) on his back "1 Fat Englishman – I fuck anything". In one of his memoirs, Amis wrote: "Now and then I become conscious of having the reputation of being one of the great drinkers, if not one of the great drunks, of our time". He suggests that this is the result of a naïve tendency on the part of his readers to apply the behaviour