Who is gully wells

Gully Wells is the daughter of a once-famous American writer and pundit, Dee Wells - the talk of London in the Fifties and Sixties for her glamour, sharp mind, cruel wit and bad behaviour. She liked to shock, swore like a trooper, and brought up her children with a complete disregard for convention - and for normal maternal consideration too. The children were Gully one of those silly nicknames the upper middle classes are so inexplicably fond of , whose father was a diplomat, and Nick, whose father was the philosopher and notorious philanderer, Professor Freddie Ayer.

This rollicking tale of their lives and loves also records an extraordinary period in history with an affectionate eye. Not the politics but the morals. My mother had always been a rebel and was thrilled that society had finally come around to her way of thinking. She had incredible legs, so what could be more flattering than a short, leather skirt designed by her friend Mary Quant?

She had dead straight auburn hair, so who better to cut it than Vidal Sassoon? For some readers this will seem admirable, although others will find themselves longing for mature reflection on the way things were - some analysis of feelings which remain frustratingly unexplored. This was one of many, many moments when I want to know much more.

The strange love story at the centre of the narrative begins in when Dee meets Freddie Ayer at a party. Fifteen years her senior, he already had an ex-wife, two children, and at least one mistress, with others waiting in the wings. The sexual allure of Freddie Ayer remains a mystery for this reader. Once Dee had him married, he started to play the field as usual. He left her for the extraordinarily beautiful Vanessa Lawson mother of Nigella and three other children who in turn left her husband Nigel for the clever, dysfunctional, unfeeling old rake.

Even in old age Ayer was wondering lasciviously if some young female might just be willing to suffer the imposition of his wrinkled body. Gully Wells sounds besotted by her brilliant step-father, but fails to conjure up his undoubted charisma. Yet they might well read The House In France entertaining as it is, on a gossipy level as an object lesson.

I sense a vein of real regret running beneath the surface, all the more telling for being hidden beneath a blithe, unadorned, unquestioning style. It is more than sadness for the damaged mother who hurt and was badly hurt, destroyed herself with drink and fags and lost a leg as a direct result of her excesses.

There was deception, suffering, rage and pain behind those laboriously careless facades and it still lingers within the dust of the house in France. Yet maybe she is simultaneously wistful for the wild pleasure we all took in being bad. How to get readers interested in a story whose main characters are a now almost forgotten American journalist Dee Wells the author's mother and the Oxford philosopher AJ Ayer her stepfather?

Gully Wells is fascinated to the point of blindness by both of them; in pages, she makes only two clear criticisms of her raging mother and none at all of her philandering, narcissistic stepfather. But this doesn't mean the rest of us will be so forgiving. While it's true that in the hands of a good writer, one can find almost anything gripping, dead hacks and dusty dons included, Wells's style, so very plain and unencumbered by insight, predicates against this forcefully.

Even when her first love, Martin Amis , struts on to the page, resplendent in velvet strides and diaphanous cheesecloth, the narrative fails to spark.

What is it, I wonder, with these women who must go on about how they slept with Martin Amis? I'd feel sorry for him if it wasn't for the suspicion that he enjoys watching their hands shoot up in the air. The discovery that as a student he liked to drink Mateus Rose with his curry hasn't exactly turned my world upside down.

Wells cannot remember a time when her parents were still married; her memoir begins in London, where Dee is making a living writing book reviews following her divorce from Gully's diplomat father.

The defining event of both women's lives occurs in when Dee meets Freddie Ayer at a party he was 15 years her senior and already in possession of an ex-wife, two children, and at least one mistress. Thereafter, Dee goes into campaign mode, quite determined to bag Ayer, in spite of his obvious reluctance to marry again.

Her daughter never gets to the bottom of Ayer's bewildering attractiveness to a certain kind of woman, perhaps because she was so doting herself; she writes almost droolingly of his "Coca-Cola eyes" and later describes how thrilled she was to hear that he could once again perform sexually, in his 70s, following a prostate operation. Lucky, then, that her daughter would remain throughout her life calmly indulgent of her stepfather's extramarital activities.

Unsurprisingly, it isn't too long before the marriage is in trouble. It's not only that Freddie's emotional unavailability and general hopelessness drive his wife nuts "Oh dear.

I don't imagine you are up to cooking. I suppose I had better dine at my club," he tells Dee, welcoming her home after a week in hospital.

He has a new distraction: by now up at Oxford, Gully catches Vanessa Lawson, the Nefertiti lookalike wife of Nigel and mother of Nigella, visiting the professor at his rooms in New College. Soon after, Dee began comforting herself with a distraction of her own — the American fashion designer Hylan Booker. Between and , though, the Wells-Ayer house in Primrose Hill, north London, was "the place to be", for all that by the end of this period they were effectively living separate lives.

For Gully, the knock-on effect was possibly not unhelpful. The only person she knows prior to going up to Oxford is — presto! After Oxford, she swiftly gets a job doing publicity at Weidenfeld and Nicolson. I kept waiting for some setback. But, no. Wells's life is fabulous and she isn't afraid to tell you so. There is no background darkness or none she is willing to concede.