Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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In the final three years of her life, her inclination to have guests diminished and she moved our relationship to the telephone and computer. My reliability was becoming mercurial because, like Georgie a couple of decades earlier, I’d gone into recovery from alcohol and drugs. Unlike her, I kept relapsing. It was something we were able to talk about. Georgie couldn’t tolerate AA because of what she felt was its group-think anti-intellectualism, its traces of evangelism and moral rearmament, while I found it was the only thing that had helped me join one sober day to the next. Georgie Johnson with Charles Donovan, 1975 (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) 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. 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.

Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.

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I loved it, and (due to my own ignorance) had no idea of who the author was until after I had read it, and the book wasn't spoiled for the fact.

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.At the end of Kiss Myself Goodbye, Mount reflects that the world is kinder now — Munca would have no need to protect herself from scandal. The whole chain of lies might not have had its starting point. And Greig might not have needed rescuing from his sexuality. Mounts writes, 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. * Daily Telegraph * I particularly enjoyed Mount's journey of discovery through genealogy research, the way he found out so much from birth, marriage and death certificates. He has a difficult job as Munca didn't seem to tell the truth about herself so every single detail is hard won. Words fail us, and this writer knows it. How she is bringing people to the (grammar) table November 26, 2023 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.

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. Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount's storytelling is irresistible. * Literary Review *Of course, people are more complex than ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Some of the unearthed secrets partly explain why Munca was the way she was. There are moments when the reader almost roots for her as she constructs one deception after another with a dizzying panache. And although she’s driven by acquisitiveness and the desire for riches and status, she’s also propelled by a more understandable self-preservation. Less clear is why Greig would ever have been party to something that harmed a child. In the 1940s, they adopted an infant they named Serena Georgeanne, known as Georgie, raising her to believe she was their biological child. They expected perfection of this child. She was an extension of themselves rather than a person in her own right; a mannequin to titivate and then put in service to their public image. They inculcated in Georgie the belief that there was no point in doing anything if she couldn’t do it to an unimpeachable standard. Of course, given how captious they were, this was impossible for her. The bitter irony, however, was that she was brighter, more witty, more stunning than they were. 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.” 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. Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)