The actress Julie Andrews looks back on a rough childhood

Julie Andrews in 'The Sound of Music.' (Argyle Enterprises and 20th Century Fox)

• Home A Memoir of My Early Years By Julie Andrews. 339 pages. $26.95, Hyperion; ; £18.99 Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
• Julie Andrews An Intimate Biography By Richard Stirling 376 pages. $27.95, St. Martin's Press; £17.99 Portrait.

Julie Andrews's memoir is full of crisp locutions like "poor unfortunate" and "banished to the scullery" and "trivet," a characteristically precise term that the dictionary defines as "an iron tripod placed over a fire for a cooking pot or kettle to stand on." It opens with a soppy poem she wrote about England, but what follows is a decisively unsoppy account of a typically dismal English childhood, complete with cramped lodgings and brutish relatives, which Andrews tells briskly and without self-pity.

Trivets come into it because, as is so often the case with the theatrically well-to-do, Andrews has refashioned herself out of trivet-level origins. The story starts in Walton-on-Thames, a village in the south of England, where she grew up. Her great-grandmother was a servant, her great-grandfather a gardener, and both grandparents on her mother's side died of syphilis, the only response to which is: blimey, they didn't put that in the press release for "Mary Poppins." (The book's tone addresses precisely this kind of joke and seems to implore, with weary finality, Enough already.)... [By Emma Brockes, International Herald Tribune]