Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Extraordinary … shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people's lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us. PG didn’t mind that this client neglected to pay a legal bill on occasion because she provided him with so many great stories for use during gatherings with his brothers and sisters in the legal profession during conferences sponsored by various bar associations.

It transpires that Ferdinand Mount (the author) has quite a colourful family history. It is impossible to say too much without giving away spoilers. However, suffice it to say that his Aunt Munca, with whose family he spent many a happy childhood holiday, was not necessarily quite what she seemed. Later in life he started to look into the minutiae of her life and this book is the result of his findings. I'm normally not drawn to these sorts of memoirs (i.e. personal recollections about the author's wealthy family members), but Ferdinand Mount's "Kiss Myself Goodbye" is so well-written and bizarre that I stayed up late to finish the book in one sitting. It's true: Mount's mysterious Aunt Munca was a millionaire, but she was born into poverty and obtained her money by being a talented liar. Grifting those who've benefited from inherited wealth is a much more interesting story than pure nepotism. What a roller-coaster of a read! Mount's Aunt Munca is an extraordinary character, her life built on a tissue of outrageous lies that make Boris Johnson look like a rank amateur. The lies spread and engulf all around her, causing great damage to some and just inconvenience to others.

There is an interesting story here, but it’s let down by the writing. The tale of Aunt Munca is complicated enough without the author making it more confusing. The story goes off at lots of tangents and into unnecessary details, when what we really want is to build a picture of this woman who goes by many names in her lifetime. I felt like I was reading an early draft, before the book was properly streamlined and edited. Delicious… As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place … Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss.”— The Oldie The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.”

Mount is one of our finest prose stylists and Kiss Myself Goodbye is a witty, moving and beautifully crafted account of one woman's determination to live to the full. * Daily Telegraph * Betty reminded PG of one of his clients in the quite distant past, a woman who had her own unique style of divorcing (“dumping” might be a better term) a series of husbands. The book is beautifully written. The author is a complete master of words - just the right tone, just the right word, just the right cadence to a sentence to communicate sympathy, amusement, or surprise as he unfolds the amazing and fascinating story of Aunt Manca. What a story! The contemporary references to T.S. Eliot, W.E. Johns, David Dimbleby, and many other well-known people whose lives brushed hers place the story firmly in the time he is describing. And the places where the action took place are described vividly. Particularly fascinating was his description of Manca's time in Crawford Mansions where she lived below T.S. Eliot at a time when Marylebone was a slum.As I read on, I noticed that these scenes had been described in meticulous detail, but I’d been erased from them. Georgie was one remove away from a birth-parent to me. Indeed, she was far more a mother to me than Munca ever was to her. Imagine reading a book about a mother-figure in your life, describing with painstaking precision occasions where you were present but excising you from them. It stung. I was startled that Mount would do something so improper. When two people telephoned me to say they’d noticed the same thing, I realised my reaction wasn’t just down to bruised ego and pettiness. For the first time, Georgie wasn’t a marionette. She began living a life that wasn’t stage-managed and set up to fail by Munca and Greig. The love of her friends enabled her to bloom as a real person. It was a time of strolling to the West End for Saturday matinees and then out for drinks, of meeting after work and convulsing into fits of laughter, of travelling and, thanks to their close proximity, being able to form an instant party of six whenever opportunity and inclination coincided. Georgie had found her family.

Georgie Johnson with Charles Donovan, 1975 (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) What shines through is the author’s pride and love of family and he uncovers an incredible story beautifully told.I also can't say enough about the delivery. I suspect the story would come off as somewhat humorous if you read it, but the delivery is so wry, the accent so perfect that I occasionally laughed out loud. After Munca died, Georgie told my mother she’d never before been allowed to decorate her own home and needed help — she didn’t know how to do it. My mother guided her through the decorating of her flat in Fulham and then her first two houses in Suffolk. Gradually, the things that had been stifled to dormancy by her parents began to flourish — her own tastes, her own sense of style, her own ideas. It comes over you only rarely in life: the swoony feeling that a book might almost have been written for you. Two weeks after I finished it, I can’t stop thinking about Kiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s extraordinary memoir of his Aunt Munca. Like someone in love, all I want to do is talk about it, a situation that’s sorely testing the patience of my domestic colleague, who must now attend a Munca symposium at approximately 7.30pm every night. (There is only one speaker: me.) I don't think it's necessarily about sex. It's about wanting to start the day with some love and affection. Maybe a warm cuddle. I'm not alone in interpreting it that way! For example: this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative.”— Roland White, The Sunday Times (Culture)

Also on the shelves is a photograph of Georgie at about eight years old. She does look haunted. None of the gaiety, confidence, or spontaneity of childhood is apparent. Instead, her expression seems to ask: ‘Am I doing this right?’ Her hair has been glossed into perfect, golden ringlets more appropriate for a Moulin Rouge attraction than a child. There was nothing wrong with her original nose. Why on earth did Munca arrange that operation, saddling Georgie with an implausible story about falling over, which she had to recite if anyone recognised the tell-tale, too-perfect symmetry of the nose-job. Fortunately, before their friendship broke down, my father photographed Georgie across four decades — images that show her at her happiest. There's such a feeling of love from the author to his family - regardless if they are biological or otherwise, this marks the author out as someone who has taken a huge amount of thought as to how and why this book needs to be written. Immersing himself in birth and marriage archives along with newspaper reports of divorce and bigamy cases, among other tidbits, Mr. Mount uncovers a camouflaged trail that begins in the industrial north of England, about as far from the Café de Paris as you can get. “She was the daughter of John William Macduff of Sheffield, a scrap metal merchant,” Mr. Mount learns of Betty’s sister, Doris, who “told the truth when she filled in a form.” Betty, on the other hand, always pretended that Doris was an unrelated “honorary aunt,” even though the two women lived near each other in opulent Berkshire where Betty “in her Rolls might bump into Doris in her Bentley any day of the week.” For both sisters had married well, if a little too often in Betty’s case. To give you the premise, the author’s uncle, Greig Mount, was from a prominent English family with a new hereditary knighthood. Greig’s wife was a flamboyant character named Betty, aka ‘Munca’. Nearing middle-age, they married in haste because both were running from things and had sharp instincts for the main chance. Munca sought refuge from a mysterious, secret past, Greig from the threat of the revelation of his true sexuality. And it worked. Rather than catching them up, their shadowy histories were miraculously suspended.

If there really is nothing wrong with being gay, then why is the light Mount shines on his uncle’s secrets so much kinder and more sparing than that shone on his aunt’s? Without explicitly stating it, he gives the impression that Greig’s gay scandal was some kind of one-off. Georgie spoke very little about her upbringing and even less about her adoptive family, but one of the few things she told me was that her father was gay. No ifs or buts. He was not a straight man who just had a gay moment. Her creative ambitions had also been suffocated to near-death by her upbringing. She was the best writer I’ve ever known, but the lethal self-doubt inculcated by Munca and Greig proved insurmountable. Sometimes, friends would build her up enough that she’d start regarding herself as competent. At some point in the ’80s, she told my mother and I about the novel she was writing. It was to be called The Social Worker. Anyone who’s ever tried it knows that the most undermining thing you can say to someone writing long-form is, ‘Have you nearly finished yet?’. So we left it to her to give us updates, but they petered out. I still wonder where that manuscript might be. Was he frightened of Thatcher? “You couldn’t not be frightened of her! But sometimes, she would annoy you into being a bit braver, and you’d say: ‘Well, I really wonder if that is true, prime minister.’” If he sounds a bit like Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister, he is also able to see how things must sometimes have felt from her side. “The snobbery [Thatcher was, famously, the daughter of a grocer] was quite startling, stretching all the way from Christopher Soames [the Conservative cabinet minister] to Jonathan Miller [the theatre director]; the use of suburban as the ultimate insult, combined with sexism of a kind which even then seemed out of date.” The second thing was the mention of Sheffield and there is a fabulous lengthy chapter in the book about my home city in the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm sure any reader would agree that there is something extra special about reading about a place you know well.