Abstract
Ours is an age of internet bedlam, tabloid outrageousness, hot-gossip magazines and an unending supply of weepy, misery memoirs. Anything goes. Temperance, legal, professional and personal constraints, discretion, objectivity even privacy are swept away by the rapids of modernity and popular culture. Mercifully a few old firmaments, like rocks, still hold. Consumers of stories know that mistakes are unavoidable, some truths embellished and memories conveniently selective, but they expect basic integrity and reliability. Trust still matters. I didn't trust Liz Jones, her memoir or myself as I read through it. She admits she's been lying since the age of nine, “a habit that would become a lifetime one”. And then asks us to believe her autobiography. Entering the world of Liz Jones is seriously disorientating.
At first I suspect the book is a market-led product created by a canny and talented journalist. It is meant to be a counterpoise to Caitlin Moran, whose success all ambitious authors now want to slurp through a straw. Smart move. But what if it isn't? I then feel like a very bad person for adding more pain to her unbearable burden of pain accreted over many decades. Who is the real Liz Jones? Is it the woman performing a self-autopsy on these pages, or someone who plays with reality and who knows perfectly how to feed and prolong the appetites of the inquisitive and gullible?
The memoir recycles old columns and opens up parts of herself only glimpsed before. One of the highest paid Fleet Street columnists is broke, can only find comfort with animals, has always been scared. The most poignant and plausible revelation is that Jones has been severely anorexic from childhood, a condition surely made worse by her decisions to work on fashion mags and now as fashion expert for the Daily Mail. Her body dysmorphia, cosmetic operations, sexual inadequacies and jottings on her failed marriage to a faithless, younger man seem authentic and touched me. People who know her say she can be pushy, sad, needy, but most of all is a consummate manipulator. What we see is not what we get. We will never get what lies beneath. Perhaps it is inaccessible to her too after too much fixing of the flesh, too much real and invented drama, seeking out attention of the wrong kind and pathological narcissism.
In the opening chapter we meet her old, stoic, almost totally incapacitated mum, still in the old family home. Jones is visiting her, and, ever the pro, typing away on her laptop. Her mum peers at her “Kate Moss fashion” and what is happening is “worse than Guantanamo Bay”. The observations are cruel or shallow, though I am sure Jones feels fear and loss the way most of us do watching our parents in ultimate decline.
Though many object to it, I admire intensely personal journalism and often write about my own life. Old British customs of hoarding and hiding emotions, secrets and lies damaged millions in the past. When authors and journalists describe their own experiences of love, death, abuse, pain, exile, loss, they become invisible friends to their readers. Jones has millions of these friendly followers, because she is the lodestar of confessional prose. However, excessive, maybe compulsive exposures can hurt and destroy close relationships. Careful, calculated decisions have to be made about what to include and one has to be prepared for the consequences. I knew my late brother and his wife would hate my memoirs. They did and stopped talking to me. I knew and took that risk. This journalist seems not to understand that risk.
There is, in Jones, a frightful disconnect between head and heart and also between her words and their impact – an emotional autism. She is utterly and destructively consumed by herself. She really does believe, even now, that she suffered terrible damage because daddy didn't get her a horse for her birthday and she didn't win the “garden in a saucer” competition and she found a flatmate she fancied in bed with the beautiful black actor, Josette Simon: “Her high, round bottom haunts me still.” Her brothers and sisters, friends, colleagues are objectified, belittled, betrayed and many envied. She has no meaningful relationships with any of them. And so now, her relatives don't like or trust her and she says she is virtually friendless.
A quote on the front cover by Tracey Emin irresponsibly exhorts every damaged girl to read Jones's book, a testimony to survival. But Jones herself says she would, if she could, “rub out” her old life and never do all the things she has done. The powerful and acclaimed writer is right to ask herself if it has all been worth it. It wasn't, isn't and it's still not too late to change.