MY LIFE AS A WIFE

Love, Liquor and What to do About ther Other Women

Elisabeth Luard - Timewell Press - £16.99.

How to stay married for 40 years
Food writer Elisabeth Luard's alcoholic, philandering spouse Nicholas, the writer who once owned Private Eye, was in many ways an impossible man. But, four years after his death he is still the love of her life, she tells Stephen Moss

Stephen Moss writing in The Guardian,
Thursday September 11 2008

This isn't going to be easy. Not least since I've just swallowed a shard from a duck bone. Interviewing people in restaurants is always a mistake - they're just about to admit to killing their father or doing something unspeakable to their mother when the meringue arrives - and the Chuen Cheng Ku Chinese restaurant on the edge of London's Soho may be a bigger mistake than most as the waitress speaks hardly any English and I have only the haziest idea what I am eating.

But the food writer Elisabeth Luard was keen to get some lunch, so here we are, talking about her new memoir, My Life as a Wife, which scampers through 40 years of marriage to the racy Nicholas Luard, proprietor and saviour of Private Eye in its infancy, co-founder with Peter Cook of the pioneering early 1960s Establishment comedy club, travel writer, novelist, co-founder of the London marathon, conservationist, anti-apartheid campaigner, alcoholic, philanderer and all-round impossible husband.

Luard died of cancer in 2004. The book is a portrait of a marriage, and its opening nicely captures the ambiguity of the relationship. "This is the story of my life as a wife. Or how to stay married for 40 years without actually murdering your husband. A love story." The verdict, Luard tells me when I've extracted the duck bone from my throat, could have gone either way.

Read Moss' full review at the Guardian online.