What Georgie had gone through had a terrible impact on her development but, like so many traumatised people, she’d found a way to transcend it. And the more she sought distance from the Mounts, the more she became herself. Because she was forced to act throughout her upbringing, some of Georgie’s natural, spontaneous reactions had disappeared. She had to make a kind of snorting noise to signify laughter. Her real laugh rarely surfaced. This was an affliction I could recognise. Just how much more there was to this armor-clad butterfly is revealed—incrementally and irresistibly—in “Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,” a family history so deftly excavated and winningly conjured that it restores our faith in a literary species too often given to flabbiness and self-absorption. “It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasn’t looking,” Mr. Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel. “In this book, nobody’s recollections are reliable,” he cautions. And isn’t that putting it mildly.

What a roller-coaster of a read! Mount's Aunt Munca is an extraordinary character, her life built on a tissue of outrageous lies that make Boris Johnson look like a rank amateur. The lies spread and engulf all around her, causing great damage to some and just inconvenience to others. Delicious ... As well as an ear for the cadences of a sentence, Mount has a remarkable ability to convey the feeling of place ... Beneath the surface of this sparklingly wry book you sense all kinds of unexplored feelings of abandonment and loss. * The Oldie *The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.”

To give you the premise, the author’s uncle, Greig Mount, was from a prominent English family with a new hereditary knighthood. Greig’s wife was a flamboyant character named Betty, aka ‘Munca’. Nearing middle-age, they married in haste because both were running from things and had sharp instincts for the main chance. Munca sought refuge from a mysterious, secret past, Greig from the threat of the revelation of his true sexuality. And it worked. Rather than catching them up, their shadowy histories were miraculously suspended. Betty reminded PG of one of his clients in the quite distant past, a woman who had her own unique style of divorcing (“dumping” might be a better term) a series of husbands.The life of Buster is hard to uncover, not least because a Google search brings up mainly dogs. After many false leads and dead ends, Mount finally pieces the story together: Buster Baring was married and divorced seven times, before dying in his 50s; his marriage certificates variously describe him as an electrical engineer, ­professional dancer, Grand Prix driver, manager of a joinery and cabinet works, timber merchant, farmer, author, and man “of independent means”. Did Buster know that Munca was his mother? Who did he think was his father? And who on earth were Munca’s real parents? Georgie knew that if something was precious to her, it had to be kept away from her ‘family’, so I never met her parents. My mother describes Greig as ‘gentle’, and gentleness is an admirable quality. But when it’s corrupted, ‘gentle’ becomes ‘biddable’. With more resolve, perhaps Greig might have mitigated some of Munca’s cruelties to Georgie or thought about correcting the final one: the will.