Character Breakdown

Author Zawe Ashton
Narrator Zawe Ashton
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 6 February 2020
Run Time 6 hours and 19 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Autobiography: arts and entertainment, Biography and non-fiction prose, Individual actors and performers, Memoirs, The Arts.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Cult heroine Zawe Ashton brings us a unique look at life, work and the absurdities of contemporary life

Zawe Ashton has been acting since she was six. She has played many different roles, from ‘cute little girl’ to ‘assassin with attitude', Oscar Wilde’s Salome to St Trinian’s schoolgirl to Fresh Meat’s Vod.

To stay sane, an actor must tread a high-wire between life and art, keep sight of where a character ends and the real person begins. So she doesn’t lose herself completely.

In Character Breakdown, Zawe scrolls through a version of her life. Or is it a version of her art? Or something in between. In it, she encounters glamour, horror, absurdity and questions like: is a life spent more on performance than reality any life at all?

© Zawe Ashton 2019 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critics Review

A very great book

A smart, funny and well-written take-down of modern showbiz

Mail on Sunday

Smart, funny, vivid, honest, dark, timely

The Times

An entertaining and original memoir touching on career, life and identity. It is an enjoyable read, despite the humiliating tales of auditions or filming situations where she is physically assessed, objectified or subject to casual racism. Understandably there is an undertone of rage in her keen observations

Observer

Character Breakdown embraces darkness while also being a wickedly absurd look at modern show business

Stylist

A meditation on womanhood, failure and performance…her experiences and conflicts feel universal…it is very funny

Sees the hotshot actress/writer/director who you might remember as mentalist Vod in student sitcom, Fresh Meat, look at the absurdity of pretending to be other people for a living

Muddy Stilettos

An extremely imaginative and well-written volume that has the pace and page-turning attractions of a novel… a fine, painfully honest autobiographer/ novelist… [and] a good, witty read but which also gives purchasers a real insight into life in the acting profession today

British Theatre Guide

I loved it…smart, funny, highly original and with an unconventional narrative that asked deep questions about the roles we all play in our lives

Country & Town

A fascinating look at the fine line between performance and life, written with style

i magazine, *Summer Reads of 2019*

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