MUNKEY DIARIES 1957-1982
JANE BIRKIN W&N, 320pp, £20, ebook £20
The upper-class English model Jane Birkin started keeping a diary as a 16-year-old girl in an Isle of Wight boarding school, where she had a stuffed toy called Munkey as a companion. ‘This is the first volume of her diaries, which came out in France three years ago,’ explained Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian. ‘One wonders why it took so long for them to be published in English, Birkin’s native language. Could it be because, after a promising start describing a postwar British upper middle-class childhood, all faithful family retainers and woolly jumpers, they don’t make much sense? The moment that 19-year-old Birkin swaps Chelsea for Paris, where she will live for the rest of her life, the prose descends into what can only be described as word soup.’
Birkin takes us through her brief marriage to film composer John
Barry and her longer relationship with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded his infamous pop song
Je t’aime … moi non plus. Hughes was left underwhelmed: ‘Reading these diaries is like being trapped at a particularly demented piece of performance art, where the actors are clearly having much more fun than the audience.’ Jackie Annesley, in the Sunday
Times, found that ‘Birkin’s diary entries ultimately expose the toxic reality behind one of the 20th century’s most glamorous couples’, while ‘her writing style is as breathless and erratic as her personality, peppered with exclamation marks and bizarre metaphors. After a flight to Tokyo, she describes herself as “a crumpled hanky over a melon”.’