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Kiss Myself Goodbye

The Many Lives of Aunt Munca

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Kiss Myself Goodbye

By: Ferdinand Mount
Narrated by: Paul Blezard
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Bloomsbury presents Kiss Myself Goodbye by Ferdinand Mount, read by Paul Blezard.

'Grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page' – Hilary Mantel

'Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original' – Hadley Freeman

‘Wonderful, funny and wise’ – Kate Summerscale

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021
A SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, SPECTATOR AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Aunt Munca never told the truth about anything. Calling herself after the mouse in a Beatrix Potter story, she was already a figure of mystery during the childhood of her nephew Ferdinand Mount. Half a century later, a series of startling revelations sets him off on a tortuous quest to find out who this extraordinary millionairess really was.

What he discovers is shocking and irretrievably sad, involving multiple deceptions, false identities and abandonments. The story leads us from the back streets of Sheffield at the end of the Victorian age to the highest echelons of English society between the wars.

An unconventional tale of British social history told backwards, now published with new material discovered by the author about his eccentric aunt, Kiss Myself Goodbye is both an enchanting personal memoir and a voyage into a vanished moral world©2020 Ferdinand Mount (P)2020 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC Entertainment & Celebrities Europe Great Britain Women Feel-Good
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Critic reviews

Aunt Munca flees the streets of Sheffield for a suite at Claridges, getting younger by the year and leaving behind her a trail of brazen lies and shattered pieties. In his family memoir, Ferdinand Mount pursues her with wit and skill through a career in which crime pays, marriage is for a week, and children are lost like old gloves. Kiss Myself Goodbye is grimly funny and superbly written, with a twist on every page. (Hilary Mantel, author of the Wolf Hall Trilogy)
Delightfully compulsive and unforgettably original. Mount unpeels the layers of this mysterious life with the tenacity of an experienced detective and the excitement of a fresh-eyed enthusiast. (Hadley Freeman, author of House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family)
Extraordinary … shed[s] a brilliant light on the strangeness of people’s lives, the need for disguise and masquerade, the shame that drives people to act in the most peculiar ways, the ghosts that reside, unburied, within us. (Craig Brown)
Wonderful, funny and wise (Kate Summerscale, author of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher)
Delicious … As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place … Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss.
Mount is one of our finest prose stylists and Kiss Myself Goodbye is a witty, moving and beautifully crafted account of one woman’s determination to live to the full.
An extraordinary book
Unique and immensely enjoyable. I only wish it were longer.
Kiss Myself Goodbye is a work of beauty. The simple truthfulness of Ferdinand Mount’s storytelling is irresistible.
...A superbly written and jaw-dropping memoir.
Veering giddily from grand guignol to poignant melancholy, this is an exquisitely wrought portrait of a wickedly fascinating woman. (Jane Shilling)
...this book, which is partly a family history and partly a detective novel, with extraordinary revelations and an impressive cast of characters dotted through the narrative. (Roland White)
Witty, moving and beautifully crafted, Kiss Myself Goodbye is a “masterclass” in bringing long-buried secrets to light.
[Mount ]… vividly captures bygone Britain.
It needs a writer of wit, imagination and empathy to carry me along from one layer of the tissue to the next. Mount is such a writer.
A wonderful memoir of the author’s aunt – deadpan, shrewd and very dryly funny. (William Boyd, bestselling author)
All stars
Most relevant
Enjoyed it but found you really need to concentrate or its easy to get lost, loads of twists and turns and characters but an amazing story of a unbelievable life. Definitely not a background listen.

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This is an immaculately written account of one of the most complex family histories one could ever imagine. It is beautifully read and as enthralling as any novel.

Jaw Dropping Story

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I’m rather resenting finishing! Have a great read
From a wonderful writer from
Very a very satisfied Bibliophile.

An intriguing story from a a grade writer.

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What a wonderful time Ferdinand Mount has had researching this rich fount of fantastic lies woven into a massive web of destructive deceit by his Aunt Munca! This is a glorious family history too outrageous for fiction with ever yet more astounding revelations in every chapter. I loved it.
So who was Aunt Munca? She was married to Mount's uncle, his father's brother, for over 20 years, but Munca (a portentous sign that she abandoned all names except that of Beatrix Potter's Bad Mouse!) made sure that her previous lives were unknown to the wealthy family she finally fortuitously (for her) married into.
Through years of painstaking research Mount has discovered all. The 1930s popular song which he has taken for the title of his book opens with "I'm gonna kiss myself goodbye / goodbye, goodbye / I'm gonna get my wings and fly / Up high, up high". And boy! From her lamentably impoverished childhood in Sheffield, a dead labourer-father and a scant education in the unmerciful institution run by the Sisters of Mercy for the the very poor, did Munca fly!
Through years of name changes, she constructed what Mount calls her 'ziggurat of lies' (his language is always satisfyingly choice and frequently witty) in which she lived her lives. Munca's determination to hide her secrets discovered only after her death by Mount led her to disguising, amongst other gems, not just 3 bigamous marriages; an unacknowledged sister; an adopted daughter Georgie whose life she ruined; another adopted child Celeste who she later returned unwanted; a fantasy father and a car-crazed, 7 times married 'brother' who was in fact her son.
Mount worries away at questions and finds the answers. How did Munca win the commission in the late 1930s to arrange the multi-million interior decor of Charters, the sky-high expensive country house, the last ever to be built in England? How did she pay for her permanent suite in Claridges and all the other fabulous expenditure? The most extraordinary answer comes on virtually the last page.
Excellent narration of brilliant research brilliantly shaped into a brilliant book!

Exploring Munca's 'ziggurat of lies'

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I thought this was an excellent performance. I could easily have been persuaded Paul Blezard was Ferdy Mount.

Narration

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