Munkey Diaries: 1957-1982

by Jane Birkin W&N 320pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99

With her “long, choppy fringe” and gap-toothed smile, Jane Birkin was regarded as the epitome of 1960s chic, said Katie Rosseinsky in the London Evening Standard. Yet the figure who emerges from these diaries is “strikingly at odds” with that playful image: she is introspective and given to “self-loathing”. This “icon of French style” was in fact raised in a patrician English family and attended a “Blyton-esque boarding school”, where she was teased for being flat-chested (“I must, I must improve my bust,” she would chant). Leaving school, she became an actress, and met her first husband, “Bond maestro” John Barry, in a London nightclub. But the marriage with the composer was a disaster, and when it broke down, she moved to Paris.

There, on a film set, she met her “Svengali”, the French singer and actor Serge Gainsbourg, said Melanie Reid in The Times. Together, they recorded the “orgasmic” Je t’aime... moi non plus, and she was showered with film offers. The couple lived a lifestyle “straight out of the Peter Sarstedt song Where Do

You Go To (My Lovely)? even down to being friends with Zizi Jeanmaire”. But beneath the gloss, it was “sordid”: they “got horribly drunk, slapped and punched each other in nightclubs, vomited in bed”. Gainsbourg emerges as a “breathtaking pig”, who showered rarely – “his feet stank” – and was horribly “coercive”. But Birkin herself elicits scant sympathy, such is her solipsism and lack of self-awareness. That’s unfair, said Craig Brown in The Mail on Sunday: I found these diaries – addressed to her toy “Munkey” – “wonderfully funny and poignant”. While the journey they chart is rather sad – from innocent schoolgirl lamenting her “disobedience marks” to exploited global sex icon – she remains delightful company throughout, and never loses her “endearing” quality.