Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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It looks likea William Boyd novel, too: the cover shows an old hand-coloured photograph of a fur-stoled woman, determinedly leading a man in morning dress towards the camera. Everyone was within walking distance in the London borough of Westminster — my parents on West Halkin Street in Belgravia, Georgie and Claude in Marylebone and Andre and June on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge. I don’t normally read biographies but was looking for something different to the usual crime/thriller/historical books I tend to read, and came upon a review of Kiss Myself Goodbye by Hilary Mantel. I could not believe that it isn’t until almost the end that the author tells us Munca’s mother married a millionaire and hence all the money.

In Kiss Myself Goodbye, Mount notes that Claude’s family was not ennobled — but to Georgie, who didn’t have a social-climbing bone in her body, that couldn’t have mattered less. Interesting how easy it was to get divorced in the first half of the 20th century (if you didn't care about your reputation), and how when you got married there was no requirement to prove you were who you said you were. And then there's that gorgeous cover with the image of a glamorous looking man and woman lightly holding hands. So I feel mildly embarrassed at having taken up embroidery now – yet another retro effect of Covid-19.I didn’t fall out with her, but many of her friends did, and often it wasn’t clear to them what they’d done to be out of favour. A shadowy character, edging around questions she doesn't want to provide true answers to, he manages to discover endless amazing things about her life both up until the point she is a part of his life and beyond.

This is the Tale of One Bad Aunt, and just as Beatrix Potter relished the behaviour of her mischievous mouse, our response to Munca can only be admiration verging on awe.

An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, its cryptic and unforgettable protagonist Munca joins the ranks of memorable aunts in literature, from Dickens’ Betsy Trotwood to Graham Greene’s Aunt Augusta. In the past, she’d spoken frankly to me about her health — the oral cancer, the chronic under-eating — only to bounce back. Mount's convoluted and thorough detective work over a period of a decade reminded me of A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip, which I read recently.

My sense of myself, at 51, is that I’ve never felt more vital or self-defined; that what I lack in collagen I make up for in energy and confidence. I was lucky enough to have the chance to review this book, prior to publication, and it's one I would certainly add to my collection, I thoroughly enjoyed it.Yes, she must have been a force to be reckoned with, a snob - given her roots, but all the same such a character! My bookshelves groan with her presents, accumulated since my childhood, including a full set of Samuel Pepys‘ diaries. I tell myself ‘you don’t need to show anyone that you were close — it’s enough just to know it yourself’. It was as if they’d parked a vast, caged diamond before her, permitting her to hack at it with a toothpick once a year. I don't feel like redoing the review, but just let me say that this is a fascinating and very unusual book.

So - while she can come across as utterly ruthless and self-serving, he does acknowledge she was also capable of great love and generosity. Immersing himself in birth and marriage archives along with newspaper reports of divorce and bigamy cases, among other tidbits, Mr. I found it poorly written, bogged down in boring detail (never ending old marriage/birth certificates, house details, sport) which I know were essential to unraveling the story but it became too factual and you lost the soul and real feeling of Munca’s life that was filled with poverty, deception, glamour, wealth and excitement. The story of a family who managed to leave and disguise industrial Sheffield roots to sort of gentrify themselves by marrying, hob bobbing with the wealthy, becoming wealthy and comprehensively lying about everything.Politicians are tweeting every five seconds, so we know what they’re thinking – or what they’d like you to think they’re thinking. Rob picks a staple of the literary canon, 'Mansfield Park' by Jane Austen, a frothier read than perhaps anyone remembers featuring the "Indiana Jones of 19th century social graces”. Her insistence on perfection went so far as to force Georgie through an unwanted rhinoplasty before she’d reached adulthood. Aunt Munca is an appalling person who did a lot of damage as she charged through her life, scattering husbands and lovers and relatives and children as she went, but she's also pretty compelling and weirdly admirable. This is a nice attitude, but it requires context: Mount was deeply embedded in the very government that considered re-criminalising homosexuality and introduced Section 28, which consigned a generation of young LGBT people to unnecessary torment, unable to seek counsel or support or help.