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 novels, such as "The Green Man" (1969) (mystery/horror) and "The Alteration" (1976) (alternative history). Much of this speculation concerned the improbability of the existence of any benevolent deity involved in human affairs. In "The Anti-Death League", "The Green Man", "The Alteration" and elsewhere, including poems such as "The Huge Artifice: an interim assessment" and "New Approach Needed", Amis showed frustration with a God who could lace the world with cruelty and injustice, and championed the preservation of ordinary human happiness – in family, in friendships, in physical pleasure – against the demands of any cosmological scheme. The matter of Amis's