Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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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.

I think this would have been a great book to read but on audible it was perfect. The story hooked me immediately, his family is not only interesting by themselves but tangentially connects to many people you will have heard of. So who was Aunt Munca? She was married to Mount's uncle, his father's brother, for over 20 years, but Munca (a portentous sign that she abandoned all names except that of Beatrix Potter's Bad Mouse!) made sure that her previous lives were unknown to the wealthy family she finally fortuitously (for her) married into. 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. Each time you think you have finally figured out what the conclusion will be of his aunt's life you discover the story is bigger and more complex than you could have imagined. What Georgie had gone through had a terrible impact on her development but, like so many traumatised people, she’d found a way to transcend it. And the more she sought distance from the Mounts, the more she became herself. Because she was forced to act throughout her upbringing, some of Georgie’s natural, spontaneous reactions had disappeared. She had to make a kind of snorting noise to signify laughter. Her real laugh rarely surfaced. This was an affliction I could recognise.After some extreme school experiences, my spontaneity had become similarly impaired. I could no longer cry. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, but it bothers me during bereavements, when a cry might help me process things. I also had a false laugh because my real one was so elusive. Watching comedies with friends is still awkward because they often assume I’m not enjoying myself as I try to explain, “I laugh on the inside”. But this sign of Georgie’s damage — the diminished affect compensated for by faked affect — would have escaped most people. Only in the final handful of years did it become more obvious.

Through years of painstaking research Mount has discovered all. The 1930s popular song which he has taken for the title of his book opens with "I'm gonna kiss myself goodbye / goodbye, goodbye / I'm gonna get my wings and fly / Up high, up high". And boy! From her lamentably impoverished childhood in Sheffield, a dead labourer-father and a scant education in the unmerciful institution run by the Sisters of Mercy for the the very poor, did Munca fly! 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. 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. As a child, Ferdinand Mount accepted his Aunt Munca as children accept most things in the adult world--as just the way things are. But there's was always something odd and inconsistent with her--shifting relationships and names, dropped hints about the past, appearing and disappearing people. And just where did all that money come from? As an adult he becomes obsessed with finding out who exactly she was and how she became the rich extravagant aunt with the giant personality that he knew. Every thread he pulls opens up a new surprise, and he uncovers an unexpected history of disguised origins, changed names, altered identities, obscured parentage, multiple marriages, multiple divorces, multiple adulteries, multiple bigamies. 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 woman who refused the limits of the life she was born into and who never, never, never accepted a defeat.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 *

But his evocation of it is beautiful and faultless. Its singular topography stirs him; he grasps that, more than most cities, it is a collection of villages; he has such feeling for its hulking chapels, crumbling steel mills and working poor. Closing the book, I wondered all over again why anyone would want to apply identity politics to the writing of literature – a good writer can go anywhere – and then I sent its author an embarrassing fan letter in which I detailed various Cooke family locations (girl guide hut, pub, Granny’s outside loo) and their precise relationship to places in his narrative. Possibly alarmed by my ardent tone, he replied by return. Which is how I came to know that, unlike me, Munca did not maintain her flat vowels after the rest of her moved south. Older women on film But then, five years on, a relationship forced my hand and keeping it a secret was killing me. I had never come out to anyone before and I worked on the assumption that everyone was homophobic unless they clearly and repeatedly indicated otherwise without being prompted. It was a nerve-shredding way to live, never allowing myself to relax or to trust. I posted my coming-out letter to Georgie and braced myself. Just 48 hours later, she replied, “Darling, I’ve been trying to drag you out of the closet since you were 12.” It remains the perfect example of how Georgie’s frequent acts of love and kindness were never untethered to humour. After years of torment, a lightness rushed into my heart and I was walking on air. Georgie Johnson with Charles Donovan, 1975 (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) Of course, people are more complex than ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some of the unearthed secrets partly explain why Munca was the way she was. There are moments when the reader almost roots for her as she constructs one deception after another with a dizzying panache. And although she’s driven by acquisitiveness and the desire for riches and status, she’s also propelled by a more understandable self-preservation. Less clear is why Greig would ever have been party to something that harmed a child.Ferdinand Mount is a British gem who writes like a dream. I would probably enjoy reading a shopping list written by him. And I also want to offer a different perspective. The Georgie of Mount’s book is a broken, tragic alcoholic with what Mount calls, more than once, a ‘ruined life’. It makes for gripping prose, but the Georgie I knew for 40 years was ebullient, fun-loving, bright, and cheerful. There was almost always a humorous glint in her eyes. Yes, she was complicated, but who isn’t? I listened to the audio version of this book, which was 'jolly good' as the reader gives a very upper class, public schoolboy British touch giving it wonderful dramatics and dry humor to the words. In Cold Cream , his acclaimed memoir of 2008, Mount describes with all of his usual wit, self-deprecation and astuteness how he came to arrive at the policy unit, Thatcher seemingly having forgotten that she’d once thought him an “idle and effete youth who was full of the consensus mush of the 1960s and who was indulging Keith Joseph [later a minister in her cabinet] in his fatal tendency to believe the last thing he was told”. Their will was the one way in which the Mounts might have said ‘sorry’ to Georgie, but — astoundingly — they appear not to have felt that they had anything for which to say sorry. Furthermore, they had clearly primed the trustees to operate against Georgie’s best interests. This process of making a request to the trust was so arduous and frightening for Georgie, it may have hastened her death.

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. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. To quote Sir Walter Scott "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" This book is a delicious account of how a family has risen in society, whilst all the time not ever being true to its roots due to the tangled web of lies and deceit.Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount's storytelling is irresistible.”— Literary Review I’ve been mixing with these spads [special advisers] and wonks for 40 years,” he says, crunching on a biscuit, “and I’d noticed both the fact that they seem gradually to have become the story themselves, and their increasing eccentricity. Dom [Cummings, Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser] is only one of dozens I’ve known who’ve been decidedly unusual. But that’s partly what attracts them to the politicians, who are uneasily conscious of being a bit dull and out-of-touch, even if they wouldn’t ever admit it. These wizards are very attractive; their wizardry mesmerises workaday politicians.” 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.