By Ginny Dougary September 4, 2020. Alan Davies, the English stand-up comedian, actor, quiz show panellist and author, has written a new book, Just Ignore Him – a memoir of his childhood in which some horrible things happen that reverberate through his whole life. It is sad and sometimes funny, fastidiously observed and beautifully written. At its core, …
The novelist Louisa Young’s dedication in her memoir is ‘For everyone who has found themselves here’. The ‘here’ of You Left Early is both all-encompassing and particular. You will relate to her beautiful but, yes, sobering story if you have ever fallen in love and been loved; if you are musical or a lover of …
What a peculiar, slightly seedy, febrile family the du Mauriers seem to have been. We may not be startled by its members’ attitude to morality if you look at the raw ingredients. Descended from French aristocrats (although this was later discovered by Daphne, the subject of the book, to have been a background upgrade, faked …
Ah, the memories . . . the bright green practice fields; the thwacks of balls against tennis rackets and shouts of: ‘Well played!’; the Hammer Horror boarding house glowering down from the hill beyond; around the back of the cricket pavilion, the whiff of Woodbine cigarettes mingling with patchouli (doubly transgressive) from those naughty but …
Beryl Bainbridge lied as a child and it was a habit that stuck. Exasperated by the writer’s constant verbal fudging over her shenanigans with married men, one friend wrote to her: ‘Oh, you never tell the truth. You’re dreadfully dishonest’ — six years went by before the friendship was healed. Bainbridge’s biographer, Brendan King, was …
There are two ways the child of an unpredictable and wild parent can go: the Lindsay Lohan route or the fictional, but recognisable, way of Saffy (daughter of Ab Fab’s Edina). An old friend of author Ariel Leve’s mother told Leve’s boss after meeting Ariel again as an adult: ‘I always wondered how that little …
A summer holiday in the Thirties with the Kennedys at their Hyannis Port compound, just above the elbow of Cape Cod, might have seemed an entrancing proposition – but the reality sounds rather more stressful. Yes, there were endless days swimming and diving, water-skiing and sailing, with table tennis and board games on the rare …
The author is at the 75th birthday party for her father, Tom Carew, the brave, maddening, maverick Dad of Dadland, when a friend of her loathed stepmother turns to her, asks which one (of Tom’s four children) she is and, on hearing Keggie’s name, says: ‘Oh, you’re the jealous one.’ This difficult, virtually nonexistent relationship …
Before there was internet dating, there were newspaper lonely hearts columns – and before that, there was the Marriage Bureau. This is the story of the bureau and the enterprising young women who started it in 1939, Mary Oliver and Heather Jenner – one a serial altar bolter, the other a divorcee. Before there was …