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Product Description
Review
'A superbly entertaining memoir full of delicious anecdote, witty portraiture, and unexpected pathos' Zoe Heller 'Travel, celebrity, infidelity - and a generous dose of Provence. Charming and fascinating' Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence 'Gully's writing is like her marvellous figure: lean, provocative and built for humour' Rupert Everett
Book Description
Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter’s brilliant and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather—Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher—and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything.
Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London’s lively, liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kennedy, and Claus von Bülow, and later in New York a completely different mix: Mayor John Lindsay, Mike Tyson, and lingerie king Fernando Sánchez. We meet Wells’s adventurous mother, a television commentator earning a reputation for her outspoken style and progressive views, and her stepfather, an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy, proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he is a thinker. Woven throughout is La Migoua, the old farmhouse in France, where evenings were spent cooking bouillabaisse with fish bought that morning in the market in Bandol, and afternoons included visits to M. F. K. Fisher’s favorite café on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, with a late-night stop at the bullfighters’ bar in Arles. The house perched on a hill between Toulon and Marseille was where her parents and their friends came together every year, and where Gully herself learned some of the enduring lessons of a life well lived.
The House in France is a spellbinding story with a luminous sense of place and a dazzling portrait of a woman who “caught the spirit of the sixties” and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, drawn from the vivid memory of the child who adored them both.
Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London’s lively, liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s. Here are Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Robert Kennedy, and Claus von Bülow, and later in New York a completely different mix: Mayor John Lindsay, Mike Tyson, and lingerie king Fernando Sánchez. We meet Wells’s adventurous mother, a television commentator earning a reputation for her outspoken style and progressive views, and her stepfather, an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy, proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he is a thinker. Woven throughout is La Migoua, the old farmhouse in France, where evenings were spent cooking bouillabaisse with fish bought that morning in the market in Bandol, and afternoons included visits to M. F. K. Fisher’s favorite café on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix, with a late-night stop at the bullfighters’ bar in Arles. The house perched on a hill between Toulon and Marseille was where her parents and their friends came together every year, and where Gully herself learned some of the enduring lessons of a life well lived.
The House in France is a spellbinding story with a luminous sense of place and a dazzling portrait of a woman who “caught the spirit of the sixties” and one of the most important intellectual figures of the twentieth century, drawn from the vivid memory of the child who adored them both.
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Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
love and laughter,
This review is from: The House in France: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Gully Wells has the uncommon gift of bringing love and laughter to the story of her life. This is a memoir in which everything shines - the characters that surrounded her as she grew up, many famous in their day, and regarded as glamorous by those who knew them only from TV or the printed page, but seen here in all their "warts and all" glory, from a precocious child's eye view. With great affection, and a wonderfully well developed caricaturist's gift, she skewers the adults she knew in the 60s and 70s like some adolescent Levi-Strauss or Jane Goodall dissecting her world of chimps. Her ferociously rude and mordant mother, the American journalist and self-invented adventuress, Dee Wells; her brilliant but hapless and comically impractical step father, the Oxford philosopher, A.J. Ayer. The latter philandered his way obsessively through London, Paris and New York,like a pear shaped Don Juan, but was barely able to tie his shoe laces or boil an egg, apparently. On page after page, the book -- which in no way depends on the reader knowing who any of these once-illustrious people were -- is "laugh-out-loud" funny. In a life lived in constant motion, punctuated by adultery betrayal and divorce, the little summer house that belonged to her mother in the hills of Provence -- a magical place painted by Cezanne and van Gogh, and here brought deliciously to life by Wells in words -- was her still point in a whirligig world. It was here, in an old Provencal mas, among the vines and olives that grow on ancient terraces all around, that she had her first kiss, her first glass of (Rose de Bandol) wine, lost her virginity to the local hairdresser (hilariously described), learned to cook bouillabaisse, and boef en daube, lounged in bed all day with her latest lover, studied the the foibles of the unlovely half-naked French bourgeoisie on the local beach, and much later, brought her children to meet their grandmother each summer. In the end she buried Dee Wells' ashes on the terrace by the kitchen. There is no remorse here, no sentimentality no retribution. "The House in France" is a beautiful, clear-eyed, generous, forgiving book about lives well lived. I have rarely enjoyed a memoir more.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Part travelloge and part family history,
By
This review is from: The House in France: A Memoir (Hardcover)
Gully Wells has written a wonderful memoir that deals frankly with both family history and dynamics in relation to her mother's holiday home in Provence. Wells, editor and writer at Conde Nast's Traveler, is the British born-and-raised daughter of two Americans who separated after her birth. She was raised in London by her mother and step-father, the noted philosopher A.J. Ayer. She also spent time with her father, an American in the diplomatic service. But the main emphasis - and the second lead character - is on Gully's mother, Dee Wells Ayer.Dee Wells moved to London in the mid-1950's - young daughter in tow - after divorcing her husband. Dee and the ex split up on very good terms and remained friends and active in each other's lives until Dee's death. In fact, almost everyone in Gully's life were on good terms with everyone else. Former girlfriends and lovers mixed with current and future ones and the crowd Dee and Freddy (Ayer) ran with were amazingly, say, "lenient" in their morals. But they were a creative and intellectual bunch - Martin Amis, Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchins were among the few in the Ayers/Wells "crowd". Gully was given an education along the way and ended up at Oxford. She eventually married and settled with her - one and only - husband in the US. But along the way, Gully Wells had fun. Fun in London, Oxford, Paris, the South of France, and New York. She had many friends - both male and female - but her closest friend was probably her mother, Dee. By turns loving, mercurial, perplexing, and other ying/yangs, Dee had a profound influence on Gully. And no where was that felt more than in Dee's house near Toulon. Dee entertained at the house and there were always visitors and adventures, both at home and at the restaurants and beaches in Provence. Meals, no matter where taken, were always treats in culinary adventures. Gully Wells name and place drops on almost every page, but rather than sounding like braggadocio, her stories are always interesting. Two degrees of separation between intellectual and artistic giants, and all that, all in Dee and Gully's lives and homes. Wells is a very good writer. You might not know all the people she writes about - most are gone now - but you'll probably wish you did, after reading her memoir.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.2 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews) 24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A lesson in understanding and adoration,
By Simply Luxurious - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The House in France: A Memoir (Hardcover)
With exquisitely beautiful and frank detail, author Gully Wells shares in her memoir The House of France the memories she has of her mother Dee Wells and her step-father Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer as she grew up in London, Paris and in their summer home situated between Toulon and Marseille all amongst the royal, social and political elite.Wells consistently paints images of a young girl coming to understand her mother through her writing, the eccentricities she observed and why it was her mother became the fierce independent woman who spoke her mind with such resolute conviction being the glamorous and often rebellious American journalist who wrote for The Guardian, The New York Times as well as authored a successful book titled Jane released in 1973. Explaining how her mother's wisdom clearly molded her into the woman she became, Wells giftedly tells a seemingly objective description that isn't always flattering, but always intriguing; however, throughout the entire piece there is an undercurrent of utter love and adoration that can't be contained in the last few pages as she writes about her return to her mother's house in France and how after six years following her mother's death she is finally able to return as she has never been without her mother present until at that very moment. Beginning in Paris where her mother and father met and married, readers will be delighted, shocked, impressed and charmed by this wonderfully scripted memoir that is a traveler's dream and a daughter's reality. Excerpt from the book: "'Take a chance' - this was the precept she had always lived by, the impulse that had propelled her forward, the belief she clung to as fervently as any of the pilgrims who worshipped at the shrine of Notre-Dame du Beausset-Vieux, in that tiny chapel on top of the hill, behind our house." 20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant and hilarious,
By sponkerina - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The House in France: A Memoir (Hardcover)
In the current flood of memoirs hitting the market, The House in France stands alone as a witty, wry portrait of an unusually clever and entertaining family. The book spans the life of Gully Wells from her childhood in the fifties through her coming of age in the sixties and her adulthood in contemporary New York City. She takes us on a breathless tour of literary London populated with many familiar names, not the least of whom, was her brilliant stepfather A.J.Ayer. Her mother, Dee Wells, was a journalist and television personality known for her "take no prisoners" conversational style.The house of the title is an ancient, beloved farmhouse at the unfashionable end of the Cote d'Azur. It is here that the family shares their most delightful, outrageous and hilarious adventures with a cast of characters that would be impossible to invent. It is the single place they will all be forever drawn back to. I can't recommend this book enough. It is not only highly entertaining, but laugh-out-loud funny, a perfect summer read. 15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
1.0 out of 5 stars
Shallow name-dropping,
By Daisy - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The House in France: A Memoir (Hardcover)
I enjoy this kind of memoir and was looking forward to reading The House in France. What a disappointment! It was a struggle plodding on to the end, and the only reason I did was that based on the other, glowing, reviews, I thought at some point the book might get better. Nope, never did. Why it is of interest to anyone to read about these shallow, dysfunctional, artificial, and annoying people, is beyond me. The entire point of the book seems to be name-dropping. The author is repetitive, nay perseverative, in her zeal to tell us she knows anyone who is anyone. The author's mother comes across as an adulterous wife, negligent mother, and a vain, superficial person. The only thing this book proves is that people get to where they are in life based on their connections, certainly not on talent. As if we didn't know that already! My advice? Life is too short to waste on this book. Read Julia Child's "My Life in France" instead, much more enjoyable and written by someone who's actually contributed something.
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