Take a Girl Like Me, by Diana Melly

Leave the story there, and it sounds like a heartwarming, if raffish, tribute to love at first sight. The details of this bohemian marriage, though, are not very pretty. George "loved me very much", writes Diana, but "I could never feel certain that he did". One thing that may have given her doubts was George's penchant for bedding any tolerable-looking female who gave him the eye. Diana accompanied him on tours with his jazz band to protect him from fans and hovered round the offices of newspapers for which he wrote, to make sure he didn't get off with a secretary.

All this vigilance was wearing and, eventually, not even effective. Diana left George to his outside interests, male and female, and took lovers of her own, though a sorry lot.

Jeremy "needed to put himself on the other side of the world... not just because he feared me, despised and belittled me, but because he loved me ". That's one way of describing it. With an 18-year-old who is naïve for his age and dim for anyone, Diana travels to Marrakesh and, in one of those scenes that Americans take for British sophistication but is just insensitivity, has dinner with George and his girlfriend, who are there at the same time. Diana and the toy-boy are staying in a camper van; the other two are at the luxurious Mamounia hotel.

This seems an emblem of George and Diana's relationship. Diana buys a house in Wales (this fact alone explains the endurance of many long-term marriages), cries a lot, has sex with the servants, and puts all manner of things in her mouth and up her nose.

This way of life took its toll, not only on Diana, who twice took a handful of pills (when she was not alone), but on her dependants. Her son from a teenage marriage, sent to live for years with an aunt, doesn't fit into the household, wants love that Diana can't give, becomes a heroin addict (she doesn't notice) and dies at 24. Diana takes in the son and daughter of a friend who has gone to prison, and doesn't worry when the 10-year-old boy is befriended by a 30-year-old man whose flat is decorated with pictures of half-naked men; she knows that homosexuality is not the same as paedophilia. She doesn't find out till much later that the man has been raping him. When the boy and his sister leave, Diana's therapist helps her "to deal with the loss of the children".

The author's frankness may endear her to some, and her plain, slap-it-on-a-plate style has its merits. But this portrait of matched narcissists, while much lower than usual on self-pity and self-congratulation, is not entirely free of it. "I've finally forgiven myself," Diana says, referring to her son's awful life and death. We may wonder whether God feels the same.