Why Not Say What Happened?: A Memoir

"This is one of my favourites. When I said it’s hard to write a memoir and get the voice right, this is one of the examples of really doing it right. The book is about another dauntless daughter. Ivana’s mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, was a member of the Guinness family. While Ivana was growing up, Lady Caroline lived with the poet Robert Lowell but he turns out not to be Ivana’s father. In fact, Ivana’s mother never tells her who her actual father is. It’s only after her mother’s death that Ivana goes through this process of finding out who her real father was. So, I thought that was pretty courageous — to investigate it and to write it all down and to tell it so well. She loved her mother — they had a very strong relationship — but there were also destructive elements, like alcoholism. On the one hand Ivana had a very privileged upbringing. When she was younger she lived in a beautiful house in Kent and they always had money. But they had this very odd background and she had a terrible accident as a child, so she had to overcome all this. Her story was so compelling I felt like I read this book in thirty seconds."