Most writers, eventually, feel called upon to write their family story. Mary-Kay Wilmers is not a writer, but she is important to writers as the editor (and financial saviour) of the London Review of Books, a journal as highbrow as herself. Her dustjacket picture shows her elegant, beady-eyed, with cropped grey hair, spectacles perched on nose, lips pursed: a thinking, serious person of “editorial pernicketiness”. Having thought about this book for 20 years, she opens with a disarming confession (“When I was fifteen, my mother told me nobody liked me”) and a cogitation on why we keep family letters: “You think you’re interested in their story, only to discover that mainly you’re obsessed with your own.” Her father was sceptical about her investigating her
The Eitingons by Mary Kay Wilmers
This biography of a hustling Russo-American family is rich, detailed — and ultimately unsatisfying