Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.

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. 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 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) *Just how much more there was to this armor-clad butterfly is revealed—incrementally and irresistibly—in “Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,” a family history so deftly excavated and winningly conjured that it restores our faith in a literary species too often given to flabbiness and self-absorption. “It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasn’t looking,” Mr. Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel. “In this book, nobody’s recollections are reliable,” he cautions. And isn’t that putting it mildly. TonyT on Law firms are throwing legal spaghetti at the wall to take down gen-AI, but judges are so far unimpressed A few things drew me to this book. First of all it was the intrigue behind the author's Aunt Munca, not just the fact that she used the name of a Beatrix Potter mouse but also the fact she was quite a mysterious figure for him. He grew up spending quite a lot of time around her but never really felt that he knew her fully. 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.

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 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. Georgie Johnson with Meg Donovan, 1971. (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) 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. In the final three years of her life, her inclination to have guests diminished and she moved our relationship to the telephone and computer. My reliability was becoming mercurial because, like Georgie a couple of decades earlier, I’d gone into recovery from alcohol and drugs. Unlike her, I kept relapsing. It was something we were able to talk about. Georgie couldn’t tolerate AA because of what she felt was its group-think anti-intellectualism, its traces of evangelism and moral rearmament, while I found it was the only thing that had helped me join one sober day to the next.

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Each chapter is truly an adventure. While I truly admire the author's to nasty, I'm deducting a star for the fact that I did have to skim in a couple of places, as well as that she was familiar with the players as part of his family, whereas I had to just guess as best I could and go with the flow regarding who fit in where. It got that complicated at times. But, don't be put off as in the end it's a "ripping good yarn" for sure.

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. Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible. What a wonderful time Ferdinand Mount has had researching this rich fount of fantastic lies woven into a massive web of destructive deceit by his Aunt Munca! This is a glorious family history too outrageous for fiction with ever yet more astounding revelations in every chapter. I loved it. At the end of Kiss Myself Goodbye, Mount reflects that the world is kinder now — Munca would have no need to protect herself from scandal. The whole chain of lies might not have had its starting point. And Greig might not have needed rescuing from his sexuality. Mounts writes, 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.

It is to her credit that she only began to withdraw after a health ordeal hit her hard. As soon as Georgie told me about her oral cancer diagnosis, I came to her side. She was understandably terrified of an operation that was going to remove parts of her face. I came to stay again, just before the surgery, for moral support. Although the surgeons left her with only a faint scar and some damage to the inside of her mouth, she took it badly. It had a slight but noticeable effect on her diction. After all that childhood conditioning about perfection, no wonder what seemed like a miraculous recovery to her friends was nothing of the sort to her. When we spent Christmas 2007 together, she didn’t want to eat in front of me, because the damage to her mouth made eating a more ungainly process. Eventually, she began skipping eating altogether, subsisting on build-up drinks. 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. 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. 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. 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. The moral of the tale is that the fabrications of a lifetime will unravel after death, especially if there happens to be an assiduous nephew to hand.

Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount's storytelling is irresistible. * Literary Review *In the 1940s, they adopted an infant they named Serena Georgeanne, known as Georgie, raising her to believe she was their biological child. They expected perfection of this child. She was an extension of themselves rather than a person in her own right; a mannequin to titivate and then put in service to their public image. They inculcated in Georgie the belief that there was no point in doing anything if she couldn’t do it to an unimpeachable standard. Of course, given how captious they were, this was impossible for her. The bitter irony, however, was that she was brighter, more witty, more stunning than they were.