Take A Girl Like Me: Life With George

Description

An addictive, exceptional memoir of a woman's life and a long and turbulent marriage, that breaks your heart but also makes you howl with laughter. Once there was a girl, pretty and smart and sexy. By her mid-twenties, she'd acquired two husbands and two children, and life wasn't going to plan... Then she met a man. Outrageous, brilliant, impossible, charismatic and kind, he was irresistible. Sex, drugs and jazz were a heady combination for the girl from Essex. Suddenly it was the swinging sixties and she was juggling babies with one hand and popping pills with the other. When George Melly wasn't in jazz clubs, he was fishing - and not just for fish.Brutally honest, hilariously candid, Diana Melly tells the extraordinary story of a turbulent marriage, of the uncharted trajectory of a woman's life from the fifties to the new century - by way of a glitteringly seductive crowd that includes Bruce Chatwin, Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Kenneth Tynan, Jonathan Miller and a host of other luminaries. Written with a unique and clear-eyed self-effacement, here is an addictive, exceptional memoir, glowing with life and love, that breaks your heart, but makes you glad to be alive.

Diana Melly has been a nightclub hostess, model, novelist, mini-cab driver, wife, mother and grandmother. She was married to George Melly from 1963 until his death in 2007.

Hers is an extraordinary story, exceptionally well told -- Lilian Pizzichini * Independent on Sunday * In the course of an unstructured life, her compassionate nature matures and endures, to the benefit of a great many people -- Joan Bakewell * New Statesman * Her life makes a wonderful read -- Caroline Gascoigne * Sunday Times * It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me -- Nicholas Haslam * Spectator * Diana Melly writes with a kind of stoned simplicity that is very effective, telling her often harrowing tale in a bleak and candid manner that carried great conviction * Sunday Telegraph *