My Life as a Wife - Love, liquor and what to do about the other women

Elisabeth Luard

Triumph and tragedy, happiness and despair, joy and sorrow - through love and death and life lived to the full with a man who loved both alcohol and other women - for food-writer Elisabeth Luard, marriage to writer and sometime king of satire Nicholas Luard was never going to be easy.

‘If a man can be judged by the company he keeps, so can a wife. Private Eye. Beyond the Fringe. Peter Cook. Lenny Bruce. Ken Tynan. Christine Keeler. Jack Profumo. The Rolling Stones. The Clermont Club. Johnny Lucan. Jimmy Goldsmith… Nicholas, the man to whom I was married for forty years, was always ahead of the game. I started real life as a wife – but that’s not how it ends.’

In 1962 and just turned twenty-one, Elizabeth married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain – an adventure featured in her first autobiography, Family Life.

My Life continues the story, telling of a forty-year marriage and the people and places which brought both sunshine and shadow. From her childhood in South America to the private gaming tables of Monte Carlo to a rebellious year as a debutante to bringing up a family in the wilds of Andalusia to a prizewinning career as a cookery-writer to the death of a beloved daughter from Aids to the grim days of her husband’s liver-transplant through to the final reckoning - when a man who attracted success as easily as disaster refused to accept the consequences of what couldn’t be changed.

Yet this is a story of laughter and hope as well sadness - the healing power of children, the comfort of the kitchen table, the simple joy of making life work. Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing was only the start of the story - this is the rest.

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