Girl Least Likely To:
Thirty years of fashion, fasting and Fleet Street by Liz Jones
Published by Simon
& Schuster
16th January 2014
Paperback Edition
Liz Jones is Fashion Editor of the Daily Mail, and a columnist for the Mail on Sunday. She is the
former editor of Marie Claire, which
sounds quite an achievement, but she was sacked three years in. A psychotherapist once told her, ‘What you
brood on will hatch’, and she was right.
Nothing Liz ever did in life ever worked out. Nothing. Not one single thing.
Liz grew up in Essex, the youngest of seven
children. Her mother was a martyr, her
dad so dashing that no other man could ever live up to his pressed and polished
standards. Her siblings terrified her,
with their Afghan coats, cigarettes, parties, sex and drugs. They made her father shout, and her mother
cry.
Liz became an anorexic aged eleven, an illness that
continues to blight her life today. She
remained a virgin until her thirties, and even then found the wait wasn’t
really worth it; it was just one more thing to add to her to do list. She was named Columnist of the Year 2012 by
the British Society of Magazine Editors, but is still too frightened to answr
the phone, too filled with disgust at her own image to glance in the mirror or
eat a whole avocado.
She lives alone with her four rescued collies, three
horses and seventeen cats. Girl
Least Likely To is the opposite of ‘having it all’. It is a life lesson in how NOT to be a
woman.
I went to visit my mum
today. She is in her old bedroom, still
in the semi-detached Sixties’ house she shared with my dad in Saffron Walden in
Essex, but the room could now by anywhere.
Or at least, anywhere inside an institution. Her bedroom furniture has been taken away – the double divan, the
heavy, dark dressing table – as the carers found it to be in the way, too low,
too high, too heavy. Basically, my
mum’s pride and joy, Pledged over many decades, contravened health and
safety. She is, instead, in a narrow
hospital cot, with metal bars on each side, a hoist above her hovering like an
obscene child’s mobile. It twinkles, I
suppose, when someone has bothered to open the curtains (a ritual that began
and ended my mum’s every day, whilst she could still wield a mop to shove the
heavy, oak curtain pole back up into place, given it always drooped with the
weight of the blue velvet). But rather
than being a comfort, the mobile-hoist hybrid is a constant reminder of her
infirmity.
Everything in the room
is the colour of her dentures, which she no longer wears, given she no longer
eats solids. There are pads and wipes
and cotton wool and anti-bac gels everywhere, as though she were a giant
baby. She is served tiny spoons of baby
food by a Latvian carer who shouts, from time to time, ‘How are you feeling today,
Meesees Jones?’ A lifelong tea addict,
her only liquid is lukewarm water, syringed from a small pipette into her
gaping maw; a mouth like that of a long-neglected baby bird. Occasionally, the water hits the back of her
throat and she splutters. She can no
longer watch TV, even if she could ever find her glasses (a lifelong quest), or
listen to the radio, so these last ornaments of normality have been
excised. She doesn’t really know it is
me, her youngest child, her baby, her Lizzie (her other children were summoned
with a roll call – ClarePhilipNickLynTonySue – until she hit upon the right
one, but she always knew it was me) sitting by her bed, my silver laptop a
shield from her torment.
Liz Jones is a bit like Marmite. You either love her or hate her and this book will not change
that. Many who already dislike her will
read this and continue to do so. Those
of the three million readers of her column in the Mail on Sunday will read it and love every word. So what about those who aren’t sure, or have
maybe never even heard of Liz Jones?
(At the time of writing, Liz is currently gracing our tv screens on
Channel 4's Big Brother).
Journalist and fashionista Liz Jones never felt she would be
good at anything. She only really had
two ambitions, to own a horse and to appear in Vogue magazine. The first she finally managed a few years
ago, the latter she never achieved.
Starting out as reporter on Lyons
Mail, Liz worked her way up through the likes of Company magazine until she was offered the role of Editor of Marie Claire. She was to dramatically fall from grace just three years into the
role by challenging the ‘body issue’ and the way that magazines portray women.
This is Liz’s account of her life, from her first childhood
home by the A130 that she was too scared to cross, to her failed marriage to an
adulterous husband; Liz reveals all. I
will readily admit to being a reader, and admirer, of her column in the MoS.
I do think that she has become a parody of herself, that with her
writing she has created a persona that she now cannot afford to shake off. But, she has an unfailing talent for
writing, and publishing things that shouldn’t be said, but for Liz, that has
made her career. She no longer has a
husband, or very many friends as a result but she tells it as she sees it. She is nothing but unseeingly honest. I actually really enjoyed this book, she
focuses more on her earlier years than the later ones of her marriage, and
current relationships, but that’s what the book is about; if you want the
latest ins-and-outs of her life, read her weekly column. However, I wouldn’t want to be Liz Jones for
anything. She clearly is a woman who
tries too hard, and seemingly fails at almost everything in doing so. Is she her own worse enemy? Probably.
Happy Reading
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