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.

When I was 21, I came out to her by letter. I was terrified. I had been deeply wounded by being outed at school, twice. I was part of the Section 28 generation, unable to go to any authority figure with my worries about being gay in a country that openly hated gay people. Under Margaret Thatcher, the gay liberation gains made in the ’70s were gradually reversed, to the point where the government and the newspapers that supported it were starting to agitate for the re-criminalisation of homosexuality. After I was outed at 16, with disastrous consequences, every self-preserving fibre in me rallied and I ‘inned’ myself permanently so as to survive. 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. 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. Georgie knew that if something was precious to her, it had to be kept away from her ‘family’, so I never met her parents. My mother describes Greig as ‘gentle’, and gentleness is an admirable quality. But when it’s corrupted, ‘gentle’ becomes ‘biddable’. With more resolve, perhaps Greig might have mitigated some of Munca’s cruelties to Georgie or thought about correcting the final one: the will. Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount.Mount with Margaret Thatcher at a party in London, April 1992. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images 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. 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. 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. The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.”

Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light. 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. Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.) To give you the premise, the author’s uncle, Greig Mount, was from a prominent English family with a new hereditary knighthood. Greig’s wife was a flamboyant character named Betty, aka ‘Munca’. Nearing middle-age, they married in haste because both were running from things and had sharp instincts for the main chance. Munca sought refuge from a mysterious, secret past, Greig from the threat of the revelation of his true sexuality. And it worked. Rather than catching them up, their shadowy histories were miraculously suspended.Here is where I should disclose a personal interest. Georgie was my Godmother. By that I don’t mean someone who organised an outing once a year and sent a Christmas card. I mean someone who joined my parents in loving me profoundly and taking on responsibility for my development. I didn’t expect to be mentioned in Mount’s book. I’m not important and I’m certainly not important to the story. But then, right at the end, came two scenes at which I was present.

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.

Books

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. Kiss Myself Goodbye is Ferdinand Mount's account of his aunt's life. A shadowy character, edging around questions she doesn't want to provide true answers to, he manages to discover endless amazing things about her life both up until the point she is a part of his life and beyond. And it truly is fascinating. The whole thing had my jaw dropping on many occasions, and sometimes nodding along sagely as previously unknown or seemingly unconnected pieces of information all slotted into place. 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'm normally not drawn to these sorts of memoirs (i.e. personal recollections about the author's wealthy family members), but Ferdinand Mount's "Kiss Myself Goodbye" is so well-written and bizarre that I stayed up late to finish the book in one sitting. It's true: Mount's mysterious Aunt Munca was a millionaire, but she was born into poverty and obtained her money by being a talented liar. Grifting those who've benefited from inherited wealth is a much more interesting story than pure nepotism.

It is also one of the most extraordinary books I have ever read and Munca, one of the most extraordinary women I have ever had the pleasure of getting to know (albeit vicariously). I’m not sure whether she deserves a medal or a very long prison sentence but either way, I’m in awe of her. There are inevitably going to be problems with the kind of behaviour which she exhibited, not least of which is the collateral damage that is likely to be left in its wake. There are numerous potential contenders, Georgie probably being the prime candidate.It's written beautifully and with feeling for those involved, where there could have been a well-deserved disgust at how people have acted, there's a presence of it all happening 'in its time' and that despising the behaviour wouldn't be healthy or fair, as many of the conclusions are based on very well-researched hunches, if not actual fact. The amount of research is staggering and adds hugely to the narrative, and the results show just what can be achieved in researching your heritage - at your peril! But something tells me that Munca will be around for a while yet. She can’t be shaken off. I will always think of her, and I never even knew her.