Welcome to Mollywood Kindle Edition

Molly Parkin personified 60s London. The award-winning, legendary fashion editor for Nova, Harpers & Queen and the Sunday Times, she set up her own boutique off the King’s Road, opened her own bistro in Chelsea. She enjoyed enduring friendships with Zandra Rhodes and Barbara Hulanicki for whom she made hats at BIBA. In the ‘70s, she began writing her hugely popular series of ten bestselling comic erotic novels, starting with Love All. She was the Soho drinking companion of the artist Francis Bacon, and lover to James Robertson Justice, John Mortimer, George Melly, Bo Diddley and a host of others.Indefatigable, exuberant and insightful, Molly has celebrated life like no one else. But beneath this outward fearlessness and joie de vivre lay a dark and frightening childhood. Molly has never spoken of such matters until now, and in Welcome to Mollywood she achieves something quite extraordinary: she reveals the source of her anguish in chilling and eloquent prose, and yet never lets the reader feel anything but love and admiration and joy.Molly’s beautifully crafted memoir, going back to her wartime childhood in London and the refuge from her own family which she found with her grandparents back in Wales, sees her approaching her 80th year with none of her passion dimmed. Life may be different now: her challenges include kleptomaniac mice who make off with her dentures in the middle of the night; her sensual passions are sometimes satisfied by her sister’s butterscotches rather than by the great men of the day. But she never misses an opportunity to regale the reader with gleeful accounts of a life so well lived, and in doing so she has adroitly fashioned her very own manifesto for a glorious old age.‘Quality memoirs are written in the seventh age – a last hurrah before death. Take Molly Parkin, the 80-year-old doyenne of 1960s Chelsea, a painter, poet, and Olympic shagger. In Welcome to Mollywood she has written a dizzying account of a 20th-century sex life....including with famous names, such as an oversized Bo Diddley.’ The Independent‘Molly is brimming with gripping anecdotes of working with the great and good, but her experiences are underpinned by much darker elements, ‘ BBC.Molly’s approach to sex is that it is fun and funny,’ Cosmopolitan Magazine.Since setting the art world alight in the 1960s, Molly Parkin has been famed for her flamboyant style and quick wit. In spite of it all, she’ll always be just a girl from Pontycymer. Outrageous tales of hedonism, excess and sensuality abound from Molly Parkin but the artist and writer is also revered as a cultural grand dame, and features on a new BBC One Wales documentary Great Lives, with stories from both the colourful woman herself and from many of her friends, which help to illustrate her enduring appeal. www.walesonline.co.uk Read more