Lewis Jones

Bookends: Pearl before swine

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week’s issue of the Spectator:

The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean ‘everyone’, or just her agent, publisher and ‘many psychiatrists’?

Ivana Lowell is third-generation PLRG: daughter of Caroline Blackwood, doomy muse of Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, and author of pitilessly miserable fiction; granddaughter of the 4th Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (as she remained for two further marriages), who in 1998 observed, ‘The only problem the Guinnesses don’t have is money.’

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