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.