While she finds some things about the modern world bewildering and strange, she embraces it all with enthusiasm, claiming that you are never too old to have an adventure – and she has had plenty. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
Whatever Next?: Lessons
from an Unexpected Life
Aged 90 and a member of the upper reaches of the British aristocracy, Anne Glenconner is an unlikely bestselling author and chat show favourite – something she cheerfully admits and obviously relishes, along with having become an unofficial agony aunt and a gay icon as a result of her writing and appearances.
She hit the jackpot a few years ago with her memoir of life with Princess Margaret, Lady in Waiting, and followed that up with a couple of popular thrillers. Here in Whatever Next?: Lessons from an Unexpected Life, she returns to the memoir genre.
Glenconner has divided the book into sections detailing the various roles her life has led her into – author, daughter, wife, hostess, mother, friend and so on. Some of these were touched on in her earlier book, but here she goes into more detail, particularly when it comes to writing about her marriage to the extremely peculiar and violent Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner. Completely unprepared for marriage, especially to a volatile and abusive man, many women would have crumbled, but not this one. As she writes, he wanted to break her while at the same time he needed her to be unbreakable. She obliged.
Writing about her marriage in the earlier book, she made something of a joke of her husband’s behaviour – her upbringing stressed the business of soldiering on and putting a brave face on things. But her Brit stiff upper lip concealed a horror story, which she goes into here.
She has also faced tragedy as a mother when her eldest son became a drug addict and ultimately died, her second son succumbed to AIDS in the pre-antiretroviral age and her third son was horribly injured in a motorcycle accident. And her childhood, despite its pleasures, was not without trouble. Separated from her parents during World War 2, she had to deal with an abusive nanny.
Glenconner is honest about her mistakes and is often very funny when she writes about what has been a life of extreme privilege and extreme contrasts. While she finds some things about the modern world bewildering and strange, she embraces it all with enthusiasm, claiming that you are never too old to have an adventure – and she has had plenty. I wouldn’t count on her not going on to have a few more. - Margaret von Klemperer
Whatever Next?: Lessons from an Unexpected Life, by Anne Glenconner is published by Hodder & Stoughton
Posts
