“I Just Wanted My Life to End”: The Mystery of Agatha Christie's Disappearance is an newspaper article by Lucy Worsley in the Guardian newspaper in the 27 Aug 2022 issue. The article comprises mainly extracts from Worsley's book Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life particularly the parts which discuss the topic of Christie's 1926 disappearance.
The article serves as a curtain raiser for Worsley's book. About Christie's disappearance, Worsley argues that a common misconception is that Christie remained silent about this notorious incident for the rest of her life. On the contrary, Worsley states that she has (in her book) "pieced together the surprising number of statements she did in fact make about it."
Worsley's central argument in the article (and in the related sections of her book and also in her 2022 TV documentary series is that many of Christie's biographers have tended to be heavily invested in the predominant narrative advanced by the police and journalists during the time of her disappearance: that she had set out deliberately to throw suspicion of murder on her husband or else play a practical joke to embarass him. Worsley argues that it is time to do something radical: "to listen to what Christie says, to understand she had a range of experiences unhelpfully labelled as “loss of memory”, and, perhaps most importantly, when she says she was suffering, to believe her." What Christie said and did has, according to Worsley, the unfortunate effect of sounding like one of her novels, in which "loss of memory" is sometimes a plot device. "But her writings about her life have had this novelising tendency all along. It doesn’t mean she is lying."
External links[]
- Read the article at this link of the Guardian website.