Welcome to Mollywood

A highly successful and much-respected artist, Molly has also had a parallel career as a writer and journalist, but is well known and loved too for the sheer exuberance and vitality of her life. Francis Bacon's Soho drinking companion, lover to John Mortimer, George Melly, Bo Diddley and others, Molly lived her life at full speed as soon as she discovered her independence as a young woman in 1960s London. But beneath that outward fearlessness and joie de vivre lay a dark and frightening childhood. Molly has never spoken of such matters until now, and in Welcome to Mollywood she achieves something quite extraordinary: she reveals the source of her anguish in chilling and eloquent prose, and yet never lets the reader feel anything but love and admiration and joy. Molly's beautifully crafted memoir, going back to her wartime childhood in London and the refuge from her own family which she found with her grandparents back in Wales, sees her approaching her 80th year with none of her passion dimmed. Life may be different now: her challenges include kleptomaniac mice who make off with her dentures in the middle of the night and her sensual passions are sometimes satisfied by her sister's butterscotches rather than by the great men of the day. But she never misses an opportunity to regale the reader with hysterical accounts of a life so well lived, and in doing so she has adroitly fashioned her very own manifesto for a glorious old age.