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 was born on 16 April 1922 in Clapham, south London, the son of William Robert Amis, a mustard manufacturer's clerk in the City of London and his wife, Rosa Annie (née Lucas). He was raised in Norbury – in his later estimation "not really a place, it's an expression on a map [–] really I should say I came from Norbury station." He was educated at the City of London School on a scholarship, after his first year, and in April 1941 was admitted to St John's College, Oxford, also on a scholarship, where he read English. It was there