Why Not Say What Happened?
A Memoir
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3.9 • 24 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From Ivana Lowell, a member of the Guinness family and Executive Producer of 'House of Guinness' on Netflix, comes "a frank and, at times, comic account of growing up amid extreme privilege and eccentric personalities” (Vanity Fair)
Born into one of the most celebrated Anglo-Irish families, the Guinnesses, Ivana Lowell grew up at the whim of two literary heavyweights—her mother, writer Lady Caroline Blackwood, and stepfather, poet Robert Lowell. Now, with an incisive eye and a wicked sense of humor, she shares the stories we’ve always wanted to hear. She tells of following the famous authors from one crumbling, drafty country house to another, and of summers spent with madcap relatives such as her maternal grandmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, and her “old friend,” the Queen Mother. But Ivana also has darker stories to tell: about her childhood accident, about her own stints in rehab, and, finally, about discovering the secret Lady Caroline had successfully kept from Ivana her entire life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Named after a line from a poem by Robert Lowell, her mother's third husband and an important stabilizing presence in her early life, this self-searching, poor-little-rich-girl story is, in ways, a search for a father. Alcoholism ran through Ivana Lowell's family, the descendants of the Guinness beer fortune; her fabulous grandmother, Maureen, married royalty, and cultivated "talented snobs," while her mother, novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, who had grown up in northern Ireland, crossed into bohemia by first marrying Lucian Freud, then composer Israel Citkowitz. Moving between New York's Greenwich Village and London, her mother also had affairs with English screenwriter Ivan Moffat and New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, so it was never clear who was the author's father.After her mother's marriage to Robert Lowell, the family lived in a rustic house in Kent; there, the author was sexually molested by a caretaker. Lowell embarked on her own destructive drinking while at various boarding schools, attended drama school, and ended up in New York working for Harvey and Bob Weinstein's Miramax. In alternate chapters she chronicles her extensive rehab over the years, her voice stripped of all vanity and self-pity, revealing a near palpable relief in baring the unlovely details.
Customer Reviews
Why not say what happened
I would not say that the book didn't hold
my attention. It just got to be quite tedious
at the end. The money, privilege, and
constant name dropping just got old.
I also thought she still found a lot of
excuses to continue to drink