The worst crime was to be a bore

Gully Wells is a spirited and amusing writer, the daughter of the American journalist Dee Wells and the stepdaughter of the famous philosopher Freddie Ayer. While an undergraduate at Oxford she had an affair with Martin Amis and travelled to Italy with him, a trip fictionalised in his recent novel, The Pregnant Widow (conveniently out in paperback at just the same moment as this memoir appears, for ease of cross-referencing). Wells worked for the publisher George Weidenfeld before marrying and moving to New York, where today she’s the features editor of a travel magazine. Christopher Hitchens and Anna Wintour are among her pals.

Her parents divorced when Gully was tiny. Not long afterwards, her ambitious and dogmatically unconventional mother laid siege to Freddie Ayer, who was much older, married and had a strong-willed long-term mistress, as well as various offspring, official and otherwise. None of which was enough to deter Dee Wells. She succeeded in getting Ayer to marry her, not once but twice: between marriages to Wells he fell deeply in love with, and married, the ravishing Vanessa Lawson, wife of Nigel. 

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Gully’s childhood and youth were spent in the middle of a rackety crowd: quantities of wine and lovers were consumed by the grown-ups, on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in the family house in Provence. Brainy men retreated to their studies to think and write: their wives bossed about, cooking and driving and drinking and uttering sardonic bon-mots. A measure of the milieu is that there are three instances of people not being the biological children of the men they take to be their fathers, in the first 50 pages. Among them is Ayer’s then teenaged son, whom Gully Wells describes as ‘tall, dark and pointlessly good-looking’, who ‘bore no resemblance to his father’: unsurprisingly, since he was in fact the child of another philosopher, Stuart Hampshire.