Cads, coke and all that jazz

Diana Melly's memoir, Take a Girl Like Me, is a testament to her ability to survive the very worst, says Rebecca Seal
Take a Girl Like Me by Diana Melly

Take a Girl Like Me
by Diana Melly
Chatto & Windus £14.99, pp280

It is hard not to feel instantly judgmental of Diana Melly. Her life, detailed in this memoir, seems to have been peppered with truly awful decisions: marriage at 16; leaving her young children with relatives to be with her new husband jazz musician George Melly; consuming huge quantities of drugs (on a train journey: 'I snorted some coke on the toilet and then smoked a joint to calm down'); and having numerous affairs with wildly unsuitable men, one as she neared 40 with a 17-year-old. However, she paints such an unpleasant picture of herself and those around her that there is a strong sense that she has judged herself harshly.

Melly knew that George craved needy, damaged women and as many as possible of them. His promiscuity and her prodigious drug consumption sent her into a long battle with depression and she twice deliberately overdosed. She knows that she failed her son, Patrick, who famously died of a heroin overdose at 24; on the day of his funeral, she was too drunk to remember to view his body.

What shines through, though, is that she, her husband and their circle, which included Marlene Dietrich, Jasper Conran and Sonia Orwell, tried to live in a new unrestricted way - open marriages, complete freedom for their children, tolerance of each other and the right to drink heavily or use drugs. Only now, as a grandmother who is self-confessedly unattractive to men, has she found a definable role.

Yet the tone of the book is somewhat at odds with the bohemian lunacy she is describing. Her use of language is very middle class, so when she describes her compulsive use of pornography, it's all the more shocking, like listening to your great aunt telling you about how she used to sleep around.

Melly has clearly been a good friend to many (often ungrateful) people, including the difficult and manipulative writer, Jean Rhys, whose letters Melly edited. Her description of being at her friend Bruce Chatwin's deathbed is poignant. There is apparently a heart in all her selfishness and consumption.

Melly clearly thinks she has been very lucky, if only to come through her life unscathed. In a way, this memoir is a testimony to her ability to subject herself to, and survive, the very worst.

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