Editing Gerald Durrell (section)

=== ''My Family and Other Animals'' ===
Durrell had given a talk in 1952 called "My Island Tutors", in which he had described four of the tutors he had had on Corfu, but had made no other use of his pre-war memories.<ref>Botting (1999), p. 226.</ref>  He planned the book meticulously: there would be three parts, one for each of the villas, and he decided to constantly switch between the three main themes of the book—the landscape, the inhabitants and animals, and his family's eccentricities—to prevent a reader from becoming bored with any one of the topics.<ref name=":19" /><ref>Hughes (1997), p. 76.</ref>  He planned the order in which every character (human and animal) would be introduced.  When he began to recover from the jaundice, he returned to Bournemouth, and began to write, producing 120,000 words in just six weeks.  Curtis Brown and Rupert Hart-Davis were delighted with the manuscript, and assured him it would be a bestseller.<ref name=":19">Botting (1999), pp. 226–229.</ref>

Durrell was exhausted by the time the book was completed, and went with Jacquie to the [[Isles of Scilly|Scilly Isles]] for two weeks to relax and recover.  His family read the manuscript, and were "more bemused than amused", in the words of Durrell's biographer.<ref name=":9" />  Durrell had taken liberties with chronology, but claimed that every incident in the book was completely true, though Margaret and Louisa thought otherwise.  Louisa commented that "The awful thing about Gerald's book is that I'm beginning to believe it is all true, when it isn't."  Lawrence disagreed, saying that it was a "rather truthful book—the best argument I know for keeping thirteen-year-olds at boarding-schools and not letting them hang about the house listening in to conversations of their elders and betters".<ref name=":9">Botting (1999), pp. 229–230.</ref>  There were, however, some obvious changes that Gerald had made: for example, he had portrayed Lawrence as staying with the rest of the family, instead of living elsewhere with Nancy, who was not even mentioned in the book.<ref>Botting (1999), p. 231.</ref>  ''My Family and Other Animals'' was published in October 1956—the title had been suggested by Curtis Brown's son-in-law—and drew enthusiastic reviews describing it as "bewitching", "joyous", and "uproarious".<ref name=":10">Botting (1999), pp. 229, 241–242.</ref>  It immediately became a bestseller, going into a third printing before it had even been published.<ref name=":10" />{{#tag:ref|Sales before publication come via advance orders.<ref>Herman (2018), p. 467.</ref>|group = note}}