My Life as a Wife

by Elisabeth Luard

Triumph and tragedy, happiness and despair, joy and sorrow - through love and death and life lived to the full with a man who loved both alcohol and other women - for food-writer Elisabeth Luard, marriage to writer and sometime king of satire Nicholas Luard was never going to be easy. 'If a man can be judged by the company he keeps, so can a wife. It Private Eye; Beyond the Fringe; Peter Cook; Lenny Bruce; Ken Tynan; Christine Keeler; Jack Profumo; The Rolling Stones; The Clermont Club; Johnny Lucan; and Jimmy Goldsmith...Nicholas, the man to whom I was married for forty years, was always ahead of the game. I started real life as a wife - but that's not how it ends.'In 1962 and just turned twenty-one, Elizabeth married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain - an adventure featured in her first autobiography, "Family Life". "My Life"...continues the story, telling of a forty-year marriage and the people and places which brought both sunshine and shadow.From her childhood in South America to the private gaming tables of Monte Carlo to a rebellious year as a debutante to bringing up a family in the wilds of Andalusia to a prizewinning career as a cookery-writer to the death of a beloved daughter from Aids to the grim days of her husband's liver-transplant through to the final reckoning - when a man who attracted success as easily as disaster refused to accept the consequences of what couldn't be changed. Yet this is a story of laughter and hope as well sadness - the healing power of children, the comfort of the kitchen table, the simple joy of making life work. "Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing" was only the start of the story - this is the rest.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2008

About the author

Elisabeth Luard is an award-winning food-writer, journalist and broadcaster who often illustrates her own work. Her most recent cookbook, A Cook's Year in a Welsh Kitchen with photography by Clare Richardson, was published by Bloomsbury in 2010. Previous books include European Peasant Cookery (US The Old World Kitchen), Festival Food and Tapas, all of which are in print with Grub Street. Others include Classic Spanish and Soups (Octopus), The Latin American Kitchen, The Food of Spain and Portugal and Food Adventures: Introducing your Child to Flavours around the World (Kyle Cathie) - written with daughter-in-law Frances Boswell, and Truffles (Frances Lincoln). She is currently Trustee Director of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, contributes a monthly column to Richard Ingrams The Oldie Magazine, and is a member of the team at online culinary magazine Zester Daily. She has published 2 novels, one of which, Emerald, won the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. Her work as a journalist appears regularly in The Daily Mail, The Scotsman, Country Living, Cambria Magazine, The Jewish Chronicle and the TLS.

Reviews

[Nicola · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved Family Life and still think of it sometimes 3o years after I first read it. This book has been on my bookshelf for a while but once started, I read it in four days. She claims to not be a writer but she writes lines that stick. The pace sometimes flags - far too much about her family tree which I really couldn't be bothered to get my head round - but her relationship with her mother is fascinating as, of course, is the central relationship with her husband. Astonishing that she never complains, not once even as he runs through all of their money and leaves her to deal with the consequences. Obviously they lead one of those charmed lives, with friends who have spare houses to lend, but even so, she her ability to always make the best of things is remarkable. I would like to have known her.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good book. I find Elisabeth Luard's story of her life, which includes her husband's on-going battle with alcoholism fascinating and so very moving! I really could not put this book down and I would have my nose buried in it at every opportunity! I love the personal touch with the recipes which are included and woven into the storyline! I'm looking forward to reading another of this lady's books at the earliest opportunity!