When Simon Doonan sat down to write a memoir, he discovered
he had no memories of cuddly family times or romantic
Hallmark moments -- turns out most of his memories are
notably nasty. Birthday parties? No recollection. But his
mother's dentures flying out of her mouth when she sneezed
and skittering across the kitchen floor? A vivid mental
image that still brings a smile. In his subversively funny
memoir, Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous
Varmints, Simon revisits his formative years and the
defiantly eccentric, lovably odd family he calls his own,
showing us how nasty memories can be very, very good.
Long
before he became a celebrity in his own right -- as a
bestselling author, as a style arbiter on national
television, and as the window display genius of Barneys New
York -- Simon Doonan was a "scabby knee'd troll" in Reading,
England. In Nasty, he returns to the working-class
neighborhood of his youth and chronicles the misadventures
of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet
his mum, Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxided hairdo
loudly proclaimed her innate glamour; his father, Terry, an
amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary
Château Doonan; and his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking
betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning "wee"
Simon into a jockey.
Fearing he would fall victim to the
insanity that runs in his family or, worse, the banality of
suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best
friend Biddie to London. There they hope to find the
Beautiful People -- those glamorous creatures who luxuriate
on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots -- and
join their ranks. Instead, he encounters various ladies of
the night, kidney stones, punks, law enforcement officers,
phantom venereal diseases, public humiliations, and camps,
vamps, and scamps of all shapes and sizes. Doonan continues
his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life only to learn, in
the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he
left behind.
Infused throughout with good humor and
informed by Doonan's keen eye for the ridiculous,
Nasty reminds us never to take life too seriously.
This is a wickedly good memoir from one of today's most
dazzling literary humorists.
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