Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.”— The Oldie Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family

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! 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.

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 was so pleased to read the last chapter to find out what had happened to everyone in the story. What meticulous research Mr Mount has done. 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. 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. 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. * Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday *

Kiss Myself Goodbye is the name of a song the author remembers from a trip to a nightclub with his Aunt Munca but it's also remarkably fitting as Munca spent her lifetime kissing her real self goodbye and reinventing herself. They often say the truth is stranger than fiction and that's definitely true of Munca's life. I loved it, and (due to my own ignorance) had no idea of who the author was until after I had read it, and the book wasn't spoiled for the fact. With her proud head and hooded eyes she does indeed look, Mount thinks, like a squaw. Unca’s money comes from his firm, Lennard’s Shoes, which is a notch below Dolcis and a notch above Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Munca has breeding as well as brass: her entry in Debrett’s Baronetage describes her as “dau. of late John Anthony Baring of New York”, which is curious because she has no trace of an American accent and never once mentions her illustrious father. The anomalies in her story are noted by young Mount, who will remember her once telling him that her mother had been a lady’s maid. 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. 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.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. 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. It was the very same government that took enormous trouble to re-stigmatise parenthood outside marriage, reserving its harshest criticisms for single mothers rather than fathers. The idea that such cruelties now lie beyond his imagination is, for me, a suspension of disbelief too far. Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

Ferdinand Mount is a British gem who writes like a dream. I would probably enjoy reading a shopping list written by him. 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:

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