Book of the week Wear and Tear
Tracy Tynan is the offspring of two of the mid-20th century’s most notorious literary celebrities, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Her father, Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980), was a “dashingly brilliant theatre critic” and the first man to say the F-word on British TV. Her mother, Elaine Dundy (1921-2008), was an equally sharp-witted American novelist best known for her 1958 bestseller The Dud Avocado. In Wear and Tear, their daughter describes being raised by the “Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of the 1950s”. Though envyprovoking in certain respects (a stream of celebrities passed through the family’s Mayfair apartment), Tracy’s upbringing was mostly hellish. Her parents’ marriage (which ended in divorce when she was 13) was a “typhoon of glamour, sex and neglect”. Tracy would fall asleep listening to their “epic fights”. In this “thoroughly readable” and “level-headed” memoir, she paints a “vivid” picture of her tempestuous childhood.
Being Kenneth Tynan’s daughter was difficult for another reason, said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times: all Tracy’s friends assumed that she must be “an easy lay”. In fact, she suffered from vaginismus, and didn’t lose her virginity until she was 20. The condition may, she concedes, have been a reaction to her parents’ licentiousness: both had multiple affairs, and her father was famously obsessed with sadomasochism. (He made no attempt to hide his predilections from his daughter: as a treat for her 21st birthday, he arranged a private screening of Deep Throat.) Though Wear and Tear is often interesting, Tracy’s obsession with clothes (she became a successful costume designer) gets in the way: each chapter begins with a description of a significant garment, such as a Cuban shirt belonging to her father, or the outfit she wore to his funeral. While her love of fashion must have helped her professionally, it’s a “handicap when it comes to building narrative tension”.
I disagree, said Kate Kellaway in The Observer: though I too initially feared that the clothing conceit would prove a “contrivance”, I came to appreciate its “important and poignant purpose”. Its role is to “dress up” a stark narrative, giving the book an “ostensible focus” that is “less painful than an unmediated consideration of her parents”. Above all, what Tracy achieves in Wear and Tear is to make us marvel at her own survival. She emerges as “poised, resilient and sympathetic” – a stark counterpoint to her “rotten” parents.