MY UNAPOLOGETIC DIARIES

JOAN COLLINS

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 373pp, £20

These diaries ‘weren’t written in the usual way’, minor movie star Collins told a Guardian interviewer. ‘I never put pen to paper. Between 1989 and 2006, I talked into a Dictaphone practically every night when I got home, then put it away and forgot about it for years.’ Collins ‘has promised us “unapologetic” – for which read, “bitchy” – but woo-eee, it is savage’, declared Camilla Long in the Sunday Times. ‘A special grade of revulsion is reserved for people with bad plastic surgery – Collins views this is as almost a moral failing: ugly

and disorganised. One “ghastly” party, given by Melanie Griffith, is “a complete crush of hags, facelifts and ancient old men in flashy suits”.’ Celebrities are skewered, but the book is also full of ‘literally hundreds of people you’ve never heard of, sometimes for pages’. For Roger Lewis, in his Daily

Telegraph review, the diaries ‘show how much time she spends with incredibly boring people, whose only distinction is their wealth, the source of power... For long stretches, Collins’s diaries – which start in 1989 and end in 2009 – are as flat and uninformative as a Christmas round robin... what eventually emerges, giving the book its depth, is Joan’s real pain and a sense of waste. Her intensity and ambition are there to conceal a lot of insecurity... She is more circumspect than she pretends – names of malefactors are concealed as “a well-known actor”, “the woman is a celebrity”, “a society hostess”. Stories peter out. It was a book I couldn’t wait to defenestrate.’