Handling Edna by Barry Humphries: review
Roger Perkins scours Handling Edna for insights into Australia's greatest export from the man who knows her best, Barry Humphries
By Roger Perkins
Published: 5:50AM BST 03 Oct 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8032765/Handling-Edna-by-Barry-Humphries-review.htmlFor this unauthorised biography of the superstar adviser to royalty, Hollywood stars, political leaders, heads of state and a plurality of popes, looks to settle the hash once and for all of those who have, down the years, insisted that the quintessence of the Australian dream of motherhood and the Four'N'Twenty pie is nothing more than a ->-bleeped-<- act by a dandyish character actor.
Edna, the tight-lipped Humphries insists in his first-ever examination of the gladioli-thrashing phenomenon since, uh, inter alia, My Life As Me: A Memoir (2002), Barry Humphries' Flashbacks (1999), More Please (1992), My Gorgeous Life (1989) and Dame Edna's Bedside Companion (1982), is a living, breathing single entity that you are just as likely to see in the same room as the author except for the fact that her contacts book is tonier than his and that he would be unable to call on Rupert Murdoch to pulp the scurrilous memoirs of embittered diesel-dyke daughters.
