It is easy to feel some sympathy for this diarist, her miseries and her failures. “E said I am a ‘silly ass’” and in this case E may well have been right. She even manages to be fired from a book-shelving job at Cambridge City Library, simply, it seems, for being quite hopelessly dreamy – despite her own wishful thinking that she was “born to librarianship”. She loses a holiday job on the Wirral, after a catalogue of errors (overstaying her welcome in the posh guest room, failing to master the washing machine, choosing to spend long afternoons on the beach, among others), of which she appears entirely unaware. But until her long and discontented stint as a housekeeper, she moves from one sacking to another. The diary occasionally boasts of grand plans and ambitions. Underneath these obsessions there is a sad story of life chances repeatedly thrown away. In the later books her attention turns largely to her sentimental, though not sexual, lover, referred to throughout just as “E” (“E said”s flood the pages: “E said I am stupid”, “E said I am exceptionally pretty” and so on, and on) to the television programmes of Michael Barrymore and to the petty sadisms of her “gaoler”, who is in fact no one more sinister than the (equally odd) man who employed her as live-in housekeeper, in a state of domestic warfare, for more than 20 years.

But it soon emerges that the writer is giving a lurid account of her periods – and this is what first reveals that the “I” of this autobiography is female, not as Masters had originally assumed, male. All the talk of blood in the diaries at first makes Masters suspect a dreadful crime, slashed wrists or at least a nasty fall through panes of glass. Early on in the series it is menstruation that is the dominating topic.

Volume after volume documents the writer’s changing, and not entirely attractive, obsessions and complaints. What Masters finds, as he reads, is a life that has been “discarded” in more ways than one. What is he to do with the millions of words that are the raw materials for the life story of someone who is quite literally nameless? His project in this book is more ambitious. In Stuart: A Life Backwards he brilliantly traced the life of a homeless alcoholic in Simon: The Genius in my Basement he told the story of his one-time landlord, a mathematical prodigy, who turned into a messy recluse and fanatical collector of public transport timetables. Masters has a distinguished record in exploring the biographies of the ordinary and the forgotten.

Alexander masters