Take A Girl Like Me
  • Published: 7 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9781784704605
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $25.00

Take A Girl Like Me

Life With George

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An addictive, exceptional memoir of a woman's life and a long and turbulent marriage, that breaks your heart but also makes you howl with laughter.

Once there was a girl, pretty and smart and sexy. By her mid-twenties, she'd acquired two husbands and two children, and life wasn't going to plan... Then she met a man. Outrageous, brilliant, impossible, charismatic and kind, he was irresistible. Sex, drugs and jazz were a heady combination for the girl from Essex. Suddenly it was the swinging sixties and she was juggling babies with one hand and popping pills with the other. When George Melly wasn't in jazz clubs, he was fishing - and not just for fish.

Brutally honest, hilariously candid, Diana Melly tells the extraordinary story of a turbulent marriage, of the uncharted trajectory of a woman's life from the fifties to the new century - by way of a glitteringly seductive crowd that includes Bruce Chatwin, Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, Kenneth Tynan, Jonathan Miller and a host of other luminaries. Written with a unique and clear-eyed self-effacement, here is an addictive, exceptional memoir, glowing with life and love, that breaks your heart, but makes you glad to be alive.
  • Published: 7 March 2016
  • ISBN: 9781784704605
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $25.00
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About the author

Diana Melly

Diana Melly has been a nightclub hostess, model, novelist, mini-cab driver, wife, mother and grandmother. She has been married to George Melly for forty-five years.

Praise for Take A Girl Like Me

Diana Melly writes with a kind of stoned simplicity that is very effective, telling her often harrowing tale in a bleak and candid manner that carried great conviction

Sunday Telegraph

In the course of an unstructured life, her compassionate nature matures and endures, to the benefit of a great many people

Joan Bakewell, New Statesman

It is surely rare to find a book that describes a marriage with such breathtaking intimacy as Diana Melly does in her autobiography, Take a Girl Like Me

Nicholas Haslam, Spectator

Hers is an extraordinary story, exceptionally well told

Lilian Pizzichini, Independent on Sunday

Her life makes a wonderful read

Caroline Gascoigne, Sunday Times

Told with admirable candour

Woman & Home

Hardly short of a masterpiece...Diana Melly writes with compelling candour

Daily Telegraph

This is Diana Melly's book, and she has the good literary sense (and the courage) to live in its pages in a way that makes me throw my hat in the air

Andrew O’Hagan, Daily Telegraph
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