Biographer writes 'consensual kiss-and-tell' about life with Martin Amis
Julie Kavanagh recalls years with young literary star as he developed 'Byronic magnetism' to match his rising fame
Alison Flood in the guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 2 June 2009 11.42 BST

Portrait of the artist as a man about town ... Martin Amis in 1977. Photograph: Hulton Getty

She called him Lazy Shit, he called her Spider, but their relationship eventually ended after she discovered he was sleeping with her best friend. Biographer Julie Kavanagh has written a "consensual kiss-and-tell" of the years she spent with Martin Amis during the 1970s, revealing his string of affairs and giving a glimpse into the lifestyle of a celebrated group of littérateurs.

Kavanagh visited Amis this April in Primrose Hill, just a week before he finished his new novel, to discuss her article, and said it was "disorientating – yet also reassuring – to see glimpses of the young man I'd loved in the manners and expressions of a near-sexagenarian".
But she says the two of them "swiftly fell into an easy, jokey rapport", where "there seemed no limit to what I could ask him or what he could reveal to me. We could even laugh now about the histrionic full-stop in the note I wrote after we'd broken up: 'I'll never forgive you. Ever.'"

First introduced by her half-sister, Amis's former literary agent the late Pat Kavanagh, Kavanagh writes in an article for quarterly magazine Intelligent Life of the affairs the novelist had over the course of their relationship – with "bohemian beauty" Lamorna Seale, with whom he had a child; with the critic Lorna Sage; with the New Statesman's then literary editor Claire Tomalin; with her best friend Emma Soames, the granddaughter of Churchill. She tells, too, of how Amis's confidence grew in proportion with his literary fame: "The feelings of profound unattractiveness from which he claims to have suffered a couple of years before we met — feelings of short-arsed, physical inadequacy which he novelises time and again — had given way to Byronic magnetism."
Read Alison Flood's full piece at The Guardian online.