Reviews

The psychotherapist Julia Samuel, née Guinness, comes from a family of “great privilege and multiple traumas”, she confesses in the introduction to her latest book, Every Family Has a Story. “There were so many secrets and so much left unsaid,” she writes of the Anglo-Irish banking dynasty.

The cover of Justine Picardie’s biography Miss Dior depicts a swan-necked model in a ruffled gown, a publicity shot for the perfume that Christian Dior named after his younger sister in 1947.

On page 100 a very different image of the original Miss Dior emerges. Catherine Dior, who joined the French Resistance in 1941, describes being tortured in 1944 by her fellow countrymen at the behest of the Nazis. “They undressed me, bound my hands and plunged me into the water.” Although it was July, the bathwater was freezing — her interrogators ensured they had sufficient ice for both summer cocktails and inflicting pain.

If lockdown has given you aspirations of literary grandeur, beware — a life of penury awaits. Chris Paling’s A Very Nice Rejection Letter is an unexpurgated insight into the battle to become published. What’s more, the financial details are not pretty. An incumbent of Grub Street since the 1980s, Paling spent years pitching novels and film scripts in a profession he admits is “perpetually in crisis, overburdened by vanity and under-served by talent”. His self-deprecating musings are divided into three diaries, with the reader arriving in his life in April 2007 to be told: “Writing income for the year . . . minus £300.”

When Simon Garfield’s labrador was barred from a Discover Dogs exhibition in east London — family pets were not allowed — he did what any indulgent dog lover would do. He treated 12-year-old Ludo to a dog-friendly cinema screening of Rocketman, where the elderly dog “had his own seat next to mine, with a blanket and ‘pupcorn’ treats”. The lights were kept brighter during the film “so as not to distress” the canine customers.

In September 1973 Jane Birkin appeared on The Russell Harty Show. Best known for her orgasmic gasps on the 1969 single Je t’aime... moi non plus, the British singer-actress was in a playful mood, coquettishly giving Harty a cigarette sweet, saying: “Suck it.” Although you can’t tell from the YouTube video, according to her new memoir, Munkey Diaries, she was also “absolutely pissed”.

The deadliest salvo aimed at the US Vogue editor Anna Wintour by her former creative director André Leon Talley is tucked away on page 137 of his aptly titled memoir The Chiffon Trenches. “Generalissimo Wintour”, as he now calls her, “was never really passionate about clothes. Power was her passion…” It’s a crushing put-down for a woman whose entire world is fashion. More so, because it comes from a friend of 40 years…

Many of the revelations in Alexandra Shulman’s memoir come in its first two pages. She lists the contents of her wardrobe, all 556 pieces, including 37 skirts, 22 coats and one pair of shorts. I try hard to envisage that much hanging space.

One of the first things that pops up when you type “The art of …” into Google is a 2008 novel told from a dog’s point of view entitled The Art of Racing in the Rain. Despite its popularity and famous calming effects, hanging out with pets — my favourite respite from this mad world — doesn’t warrant a mention in Claudia Hammond’s The Art of Rest.

Like many people, Sandi Toksvig’s preferred London bus seat is on the front row of the top deck. This is arguably the only conventional fact about the QI and The Great British Bake Off presenter, who after 40 years as a stage, screen and radio personality has finally written her memoir. It is a bizarre vantage point, but then this is someone who, at the age of seven, strapped her new watch to the “wrong” wrist and has been defying convention ever since.

More than 20 years after writing Sex and the City, a preternaturally youthful Candace Bushnell stares out from the cover of her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City?, wearing a short, feather-skirted dress. I ask my 17-year-old daughter to guess her age. “Hm, 21?” The woman behind the pop-culture phenomenon that spawned a TV series and two feature films is in fact now 60 — albeit the owner of a great pair of legs.

Francesca Segal didn’t meet her identical twin daughters when they were born on October 2, 2015. They were too busy battling to stay alive. Following an unexplained haemorrhage and an emergency caesarean at 30 weeks, her tiny babies were whisked away to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), weighing little more than a kilo each. The next day, Segal peers into their incubators. “I see red starfish hands, and fleshless arms, bone-shaped. I can trace their circulation, the fine leaf-veining of tributaries clearly visible beneath their backs’ translucent skin. I feel my intrusion upon them: they were not ready,” she writes.

When Kerry Hudson was a toddler in the early 1980s, her mother left her “for a few hours” with a cousin who had mental-health problems. Three days later, she had yet to return. Hudson was found “crying, filthy, starving”. A family member was to confide decades later: “You didn’t even get a few years’ good start.” Lowborn is Hudson’s compelling memoir about coming from a long line of Aberdonian fishwives, a family beset with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and how she escaped the poverty of their lives.

Is childlessness the loss that dare not speak its name? Even in 2019, it feels that way. We avoid the subject more than we do death, wary of causing offence. Enter Dr Lorna Gibb, a biographer and senior lecturer at Middlesex University, with this timely book, which asks why we still fail to value those who are not parents. Ours is a world where “hard-working families” are lauded and women such as MP Andrea Leadsom make jibes (aimed at childless Theresa May in 2016) about only mothers having “a very real stake” in Britain’s future.

In 2005 an 8in stone phallus was discovered in a cave in Germany. It was not the first archaeological artificial penis to be excavated, but computer scientist and author Kate Devlin believes that, at 28,000 years old, it is “one of the oldest”. What she finds more amusing is that the dildo might have been invented over 20,000 years before the wheel. 

My teenage daughter’s class was recently asked by a guest speaker: “Hands up — who is a feminist?” A few tentative hands were raised. “Who thinks women and men should be treated equally?” Every hand shot up. “So you’re all feminists,” was the conclusion, proving that the very word “feminist” can still be misconstrued.

In one of those gentrified Cornish cafes last half-term, we sat next to a father and son who didn’t speak to each other for the entire 50 minutes we were there. The father was glued to his phone while the young child looked alternately sad and bored. It was difficult to witness this modern-day neglect. 

Jeremy Seabrook, however, would have had no trouble naming it. In his latest book, he condemns our obsession with technology as “orphaning without parallel”.

Do you squeal watching Love Island, relish saying the “c” word loudly, and regularly wish it were 3am in London’s Groucho club in 1994 once more? Then you’ll probably want to put this on your sun-lounger wish list. 

Caitlin Moran, the Times columnist who taught us How to Be a Woman in 2011 and How to Build a Girl in 2014, is back with the second novel in a proposed trilogy, educating us now in How to Be Famous.

There are a million tales of love and many more of addiction, claims the press release for You Left Early, a grief memoir by the award-winning novelist Louisa Young. “This one is truly transcendent,” it promises. The book follows almost four decades in the on/off love life of a posh London girl who falls for a raffish musical prodigy from Wigan and tries, unsuccessfully, to prise him from his one true obsession, alcohol.  

When Damian Le Bas was a boy his great-grandmother, Nan, used to tell him stories about the places where his Roma ancestors would stop on their travels. One of these was Messenger’s Meadow in Hampshire, where in 1939 a girl in a long petticoat ran to tell them that war had been declared. Nan remembered it as a land of perpetual buttercups edged with a clear stream, a place for playing the spoons and tap-dancing on old boards. 

Christina Patterson was furious. A journalist who had survived lupus and cancer, and who at the age of 49 had found neither lasting love nor children, she was being fired from the one thing that had sustained her — her newspaper job. She did not go quietly. Voices were raised. Threats to call security were made. Within 10 minutes she was out on the street and for the next 24 hours Patterson literally shook with anger and shock…

Tommy is paralysed from the neck down following a traffic accident. He is nine years old. Once football mad, he is tethered to his hospital bed with a tracheostomy, a colostomy bag and a urinary catheter. Frequently, he simply sobs.  Christie Watson washes him, feeds him, reads Harry Potter to him and provides much of his mental care. “Because it is his mind that needs nursing most of all,” she writes in The Language of Kindness, a medical memoir drawn from her 20 years as an NHS nurse…

A snapshot of last Saturday in our household: the 13-year-old has lost £10 and, having tipped everything out of his cupboard, wails: “It’s been stolen!” The 17-year-old, who’d been arguing that studying hard for A-levels is a capitalist construct, wanders by and quips: “Money doesn’t make you happy.” The middle teen, trying to be good, gathers four dirty mugs from her room and dumps them in the sink — the dishwasher remains beyond her comprehension…

Laura Freeman still craves hot chocolate, drunk from a tiny blue-and-white cup and saucer, “the sort Renoir painted”. But she’s unlikely to let it past her lips any time soon. Freeman hasn’t touched chocolate since consuming a third of a Mars bar from an airport vending machine in her teens, wrapping it neatly “because lord knows I like things to be neat” and throwing it away in disgust. 

The world could do with more Wendy Mitchells. 

When this single mother of two was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in 2014 at the age of 58, she didn’t wail “Why me?”, she thought: “There will be a way of getting back some control. There’s always a way.” 

And so there was. 

It has been four years since Mitchell noticed “a snowdrift” settling in her mind, but you only have to read the January 19 entry on her blog, Which Me Am I Today?, a droll review of this book by Billy, her daughter’s cat, to know she is still Wendy. 

Here’s a book with a mighty big title to live up to. Written in a similarly breathless style, it charts the life of Belle Gibson, a young Australian fantasist who acquired 200,000 followers on Instagram by claiming she had cured her own brain cancer by consuming lemons and quinoa tortillas.

A kookaburra swoops down from a branch, spears a lizard and gobbles it down live. Gulp. Gone. As a curious young child in her Queensland garden, author Cory Taylor remembers this sunlit scene as her “moment of coming into consciousness”. 

“Things live until they die,” she writes in this slim, intellectual memoir that serves as a reminder, amid the omni-shambles of today’s world, that life is transient and death final. Her message is clear: Count. Your.  Blessings. 

There is a line, 17 pages into Helen Fielding’s latest Bridget Jones offering, that hijacks a quote from DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. She is describing Mark Darcy’s reaction to finding an inebriated Bridget during their engagement party in Claridge’s, as she reveals her “giant mummy pants” to her lascivious boss, Daniel Cleaver.

Just 15 pages in, the first sex scene in Jilly Cooper’s Mount! features the mare Wages of Cindy on a shagpile of shredded black rubber, receiving 10 thrusts of a “mighty Tower of Pisa” from the stallion Love Rat. And with that, the queen of the rustic bonkbuster is off.