Take a Girl Like Me - Softcover

At once heartbreaking and hilarious, this is an addictive and exceptional memoir of a woman’s life and turbulent marriage to a famous musician.

Once there was a girl, pretty, smart and sexy. By sixteen she was married, by seventeen she had a child, and by eighteen she’d sent her son to live with an aunt. By her early twenties, she’d acquired another child and second husband, and life wasn’t going according to plan. Then she met George Melly — famous for being bisexual, for a comic strip and for his music. He was brilliant, impossible, charismatic, kind and outrageous; when he wasn’t performing in jazz clubs, he went fishing — and not just for fish. Sex, drugs and jazz were a heady combination for the girl from Essex, and she found him irresistible. Suddenly it was the swinging sixties and she was juggling babies with one hand and popping pills with the other.

A classic in the making, Take a Girl Like Me is 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 glittering gallery of personalities 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, it is an exceptional memoir, glowing with life and love.
From the Hardcover edition.