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 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. Georgie Johnson with Meg Donovan, 1971. (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) 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.

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. 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! 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. As a child, Ferdinand Mount accepted his Aunt Munca as children accept most things in the adult world--as just the way things are. But there's was always something odd and inconsistent with her--shifting relationships and names, dropped hints about the past, appearing and disappearing people. And just where did all that money come from? As an adult he becomes obsessed with finding out who exactly she was and how she became the rich extravagant aunt with the giant personality that he knew. Every thread he pulls opens up a new surprise, and he uncovers an unexpected history of disguised origins, changed names, altered identities, obscured parentage, multiple marriages, multiple divorces, multiple adulteries, multiple bigamies. Aunt Munca is an appalling person who did a lot of damage as she charged through her life, scattering husbands and lovers and relatives and children as she went, but she's also pretty compelling and weirdly admirable. This is a woman who refused the limits of the life she was born into and who never, never, never accepted a defeat.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.

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. 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. Felix Torres on Law firms are throwing legal spaghetti at the wall to take down gen-AI, but judges are so far unimpressed From the moment of my birth in 1974 until her death, Georgie was the person to whom I was closest, after my parents. It was Georgie my father called from Westminster Hospital in 1974, to say, ‘You’re a Godmother’. Georgie dashed from Victoria to be at my mother’s bedside, meeting me when I was three hours old. When we moved from central London to Fulham, in search of more space, Georgie and Claude followed. One of my earliest memories is of Georgie arriving at our house. I can’t have been more than three or four. “Look who’s here,” I remember my mother saying. “It’s Georgie, your Godmother.”“Georgie’s not my Godmother,” I said, quite confidently. “She’s my friend.” I didn’t yet understand that people could be more than one thing and if it was a choice between ‘godmother’ and ‘friend’, then Georgie was ‘friend’. I think she realised in that moment that she’d been subtly upgraded because she never forgot it, recalling it right up to the weeks before her death.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. 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. 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.

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. 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. But then, five years on, a relationship forced my hand and keeping it a secret was killing me. I had never come out to anyone before and I worked on the assumption that everyone was homophobic unless they clearly and repeatedly indicated otherwise without being prompted. It was a nerve-shredding way to live, never allowing myself to relax or to trust. I posted my coming-out letter to Georgie and braced myself. Just 48 hours later, she replied, “Darling, I’ve been trying to drag you out of the closet since you were 12.” It remains the perfect example of how Georgie’s frequent acts of love and kindness were never untethered to humour. After years of torment, a lightness rushed into my heart and I was walking on air. 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. Not only do I believe her account, but it makes more sense. The idea that Greig was a heterosexual gripped just once, and only once, by a momentary and inexplicable gay compulsion, is far less plausible. Perhaps he sought ‘reparative therapy’ in his marriage to Munca. Who knows? But it’s more likely that he was trying to conceal his sexuality than to change it. He and Munca certainly entertained large numbers of gay friends, including Liberace. Munca, who clearly thrived on intrigues and pretences, may well have been delighted to enter into a cooked-up marriage.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.