Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints Hardcover - 2005

From the publisher

Proving his savoury wit and saucy prose in two previous books, Simon Doonan has established himself as one of today's most dazzling literary humorists. Now, in his breakthrough memoir, the writer whom Liz Smith calls 'the brashest and most brilliant thing in type' revisits his formative years and the defiantly eccentric, loveably odd family he calls his own. Long before he became a celebrity - as a social commentator on VH1 and as the marketing genius behind Barney's New York - Simon Doonan was a 'scabby kneed troll' mired in Reading. The essays in NASTY chronicle the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their endearingly dysfunctional glory. Readers meet his mum Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide-yellow hairdo proudly announced to the world her innate sense of glamour; father Terry, an amateur vintner who transforms parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; grandfather D.C., a betting man who plots to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and other assorted relatives exhibiting varying degrees of sanity. decamps with his flamboyant best friend Biddie to London, where he hopes to establish himself among the Beautiful People, those elusive creatures who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout his memoir, Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.