Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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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. 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. The moral of the tale is that the fabrications of a lifetime will unravel after death, especially if there happens to be an assiduous nephew to hand. Totally bizarre story of a woman who has few resources but her ability to marry over and over again. 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.”

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.

Finding Your Story

Ferdinand Mount is a British gem who writes like a dream. I would probably enjoy reading a shopping list written by him. 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. We are better now, aren’t we? Yes, I think we are. Our private lives are our own. There are no public pressures not to follow our desires. In fact, there are laws and codes of practice now to protect those desires from insult or obloquy. Deviancy is a thing of the past, because there is no sexual orthodoxy to deviate from. And you would need a stony heart not to welcome most of this. Stigmas belong on flowers and not on human beings. We find it difficult to imagine…how society could have been so harsh or unforgiving.”

Georgie Johnson with Charles Donovan, 1975 (Photo: Hugh Donovan / used by permission of Charles Donovan) If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. The second thing was the mention of Sheffield and there is a fabulous lengthy chapter in the book about my home city in the late 19th and early 20th century. I'm sure any reader would agree that there is something extra special about reading about a place you know well.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. This is an amazing shaggy dog story in which he attempts to discover the truth about the life of his aunt who aunt who weaved a web of obfuscation and confusion.

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. 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. 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. It's thought-provoking, heart-wrenching and a real eye-opener. All is not always as it seems, let us not judge anyone based upon Title and material wealth. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?Through years of painstaking research Mount has discovered all. The 1930s popular song which he has taken for the title of his book opens with "I'm gonna kiss myself goodbye / goodbye, goodbye / I'm gonna get my wings and fly / Up high, up high". And boy! From her lamentably impoverished childhood in Sheffield, a dead labourer-father and a scant education in the unmerciful institution run by the Sisters of Mercy for the the very poor, did Munca fly! It is definitely a book for Anglophiles and ancestry bluffs. Although a bit tedious, the author, Ferdinand Mount, turns what otherwise would be a boring set of facts, into a bit of humor and wit. To quote Sir Walter Scott "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!" This book is a delicious account of how a family has risen in society, whilst all the time not ever being true to its roots due to the tangled web of lies and deceit.