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-Hello, and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Mimi Pond,
and we're going to be talking about her brand new book,
a graphic biography called
"Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me."
Mimi, thanks so much for being on the show today.
I've been looking forward to this.
-I'm thrilled to be here. -Um, so, what, for you,
what came first?
The idea, your interest in the Mitford sisters,
or when you're, I guess I'm trying to figure out --
I have been trying to figure out --
Did the captions come,
or the pictures come, or do you think them simultaneously?
-Um, no. They're, I mean, what got me going
was that I have been obsessed with them for a very long time.
And, uh, I was on the verge of threatening my marriage
by talking about them too much. [ Both chuckle ]
And I knew I had to channel it into something.
And I was searching around for what was going to be my next
my next project as a book.
And it just made sense.
And at that point, I had no idea what it looked like.
I had to go on a journey of discovery to figure out what
style would summon up their essence.
And I did that by going on Pinterest,
which has become my best friend.
Um, people think of Pinterest as a place
where you go to plan your wedding shower,
or your baby shower, or your kid's third birthday,
but it's really just a repository of images.
It's a giant digital billboard.
I mean, like, corkboard.
Um, and you can collect whatever images you want,
whether it's, you know,
from their vast repository of a zillion images,
or you can find them on the internet,
or, you know, find them in your own collections of things,
and take pictures of them,
and put them up on your board in Pinterest.
So the thing that first came to mind, to me,
for me, as a,
as a springboard, was English children's book illustrations,
um, which always seemed to me the, you know,
the essence of Englishness, like, um,
E.H. Shepard's illustrations for "The Wind in the Willows",
and for "Winnie-the-Pooh",
his daughter Mary Shepard's illustrations
for "Mary Poppins."
Um, and then I discovered a whole world
of English illustrators that I hadn't even known about,
because Pinterest just kept showing me.
That's the great thing about Pinterest.
Once it knows what you like,
it starts showing you, you know, other things,
like, "Maybe you like this, maybe you like that."
So, it's really great in that way.
And then it just kind of went on from there.
And I was trying desperately to avoid
the problem of graphic biographies,
which is that they tend to be a lot of talking heads,
and I wanted it to be the opposite of that.
I just wanted to be able to grab people's attention,
and hold it from page to page.
-Well, I too have been obsessed with the Mitford sisters
for pretty much forever.
And, um, you know, read "Hons and Rebels."
I, you know,
when I was like, I don't know, 11 or 12, whenever it came out.
Um, so that was what drew me first
to the book, and then I did --
I kept my interest. I mean,
as you said, you wanted page by page by page --
I do think you captured the --
what was most unusual about the Mitford sisters,
and you brought them to life again for me, you know?
-Thank you.
I mean, there's just so much there.
-Yes. Right.
Will you talk -- For those people who are viewing the show,
will you talk about who the Mitford sisters are,
and what it was about them that entranced you,
made you almost give up your marriage, to...
[ Chuckles ]
-There were six English aristocratic sisters born
between 1904 and 1920 to a, um, a minor aristocrat,
Lord, uh, the Baron Redesdale,
in the Cotswolds in the early part of the century,
and, through their deeds and actions,
they managed to define just about every single aspect
of the 20th century.
And that's what fascinated me about them,
that, as women,
didn't have the power to be front and center in politics.
Um, but they had other ways of,
of working their way in there,
and, uh, they knew everyone from, like,
Winston Churchill was their cousin.
Um, they knew the royal family.
They, um, they traveled in,
in these very heady circles,
and um, just managed to get their fingers in,
into everything.
I mean, everything from Hitler to the Black Panthers.
And that kind of sums it up.
-And they were so -- the sisters were so --
they were -- each one was just an individual,
and went her own way.
Um, you know, there was some overlap, especially --
and the time period.
This was when Hitler was coming to power.
So it's really, in many ways,
the book, and your book, and their lives --
a, um, a picture of that period from, uh,
from somebody outside government,
but looking in. -Yes.
-And, um, I thought that, that it's, first of all,
I, you know -- I'm a huge Anglophile,
so, I, you know, that kind of story
of what was happening in England while Germany was arming
and Hitler was coming to power was fascinating.
-It is fascinating. And it, um,
really kind of mirrors what's going on now.
Um, in that, uh, when Hitler was coming to power,
Mussolini had come along first,
and had come up with this new idea of fascism.
And at the time,
fascism didn't have the onus on it that it now has.
And it was just this new idea of a new way to do things.
And, um, the, uh, the other end of the spectrum
this other new idea,
communism, and the British aristocracy,
uh, was really upset about communism,
because they had, uh, you know,
killed their cousin, the Tsar and his family, and God
knows what they might do next.
And as aristocrats, like --
you know, we're definitely --
they're thinking, "We're definitely on their list.
They're coming for us."
So communism is a really, really bad thing.
So when, um,
Unity declared herself to be a fascist,
and a follower of Hitler, 12-year-old, um, Jessica said,
well, I'm a communist, you know,
and she was -- she was getting her hands on every,
you know, every bit of,
of literature there was to be had on communism,
and what it meant to be a communist,
and studying up on that.
And it was almost like they'd chosen opposite sides
as a way of competing with each other.
And it also, you know, it mirrors current events, in that,
you know, Donald Trump came along in 2016,
and, you know, people just kind of laughed at him.
And look at where we are now.
-Yeah. Yes.
I -- but one of the things --
that, another thing, much of this book struck me,
was just -- Like, I just inhaled the book.
Um, was that even though, uh, Decca, Jessica,
they all had so many nicknames,
and you tell us what those nicknames are
in the book.
Um, even though Unity, for example,
who was the most Hitler- infatuated.
I mean, she lived in Germany...
-She successfully stalked Hitler.
Became best friends with Hitler.
-Yeah. Yes.
But they loved each other as sisters.
Is that fair, do you think?
Is that what comes through to you?
-Decca admitted that no matter what,
Unity was still her favorite sister.
And I have to believe that there's something
about both Unity and Pam
that was so ineffable
that neither -- none of the other sisters,
as articulate as they were,
could actually summon up the words to tell us
why they were so fascinating.
But they were.
-The name of the book,
which I said at the beginning of the show, was "Do Admit."
Could you talk about why you chose that as the title?
Well, they -- You know,
They were constantly fighting with each other,
and arguing, and, uh, they would say, "Oh, do admit",
which is to say, like, you have to --
you have to admit I'm right, you know?
And I grew up as the middle child,
with two brothers who would never admit
that I was right about everything.
So that resonated for me. -[ Chuckles ]
Yeah. I was going to ask if you were,
because I have a younger sister,
and, um,
we were kind of raised to be competitive with one another,
which is not a great way to raise children.
Um, so the whole sister thing I found just fascinating.
Did you have a favorite among the sisters?
-Oh, Jessica's definitely my favorite,
because she -- she turned -- unlike the others,
she completely turned her back on the aristocracy
and the idea of using her privilege to get by in life.
Although she wasn't above, uh,
pretending to be an upper-class English auntie
uh, in situations like fronting for black people
to buy homes in white neighborhoods.
-Right. -Which is another one of
her heroic, uh, things that she did, among others.
And she just believed in equality for everyone.
And she fought very hard in, uh,
in the civil rights movement to try to,
you know, get more equality for all people.
Um, and she—
she just, you know --
she just wasn't interested in staying status quo the way
the rest of them were.
She, and her very early marriage to a cousin,
and his going off to the Spanish Civil War,
um, and dying.
Um, she did not have an easy life.
I mean, she ended up in --
-Trauma after trauma after trauma.
-Yeah. -And she just kept going.
-How do you do that, do you think?
What allowed her to do that?
Uh, I know she just worked very hard.
Um, and, um, I think maybe in those situations,
uh, the coping mechanism is to just keep going.
-Mm-hm.
I wonder if that's like a British tradition,
like, you know... -Stiff upper lip and all that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
-Yeah. In a way, I guess it is.
I did like -- I appreciated the way
you put yourself in the book a little bit,
um, talking about why you're, you know --
how you discovered them,
and why you're so interested in them.
When you're thinking about your next project, what --
how do you decide what you want to do?
-Um, right now I'm thinking about memoir, um,
because that seemed like people have responded so much
to the autobiographical aspects of this book,
um, that it seems like a natural next step.
And I'm, you know --
I'm just sort of waiting for images to appear in my mind.
That -- and memories that summon up, pictures that,
you know, could become pages.
Um, it's kind of an organic thing where it's like, uh,
you know, something that I can see vividly in my mind,
that I can put on paper.
-Mhm.
Do you have the originals of these?
I mean, do you keep them in a... -In drawers?
-In drawers. Right, right, right.
-I would love to have a show of them.
You are going to have a show.
-No, I said I would love to.
-Oh, yeah. Yes.
-I think the ideal location, of course,
would be Chatsworth House.
-Yes. -But I'm open to suggestions.
-Oh, well, come on, do it.
-I hope the curators at Chatsworth are watching this.
-Yeah. Yes, well, we can try to make that happen.
Hey, Chatsworth people, you should do this.
Um, when you're working on this book,
I kind of imagine your room as, you know --
you do a drawing, and it goes up, you know,
and one after another, and you can see the book grow.
-Well, that's -- I don't know if you can see behind me,
but my whole studio is filled with corkboards,
and I, I -- As I finished each page,
I scanned it and printed it out.
Um, and put it up so that I could keep track, and, um,
track, you know,
from page to page what was going on,
so that it would -- it really helped me a great deal.
-And so then you worked on the, uh, the text?
-Oh, no. Everything is all at once.
It's all at once. -It's all at once?
-No, it has to -- It's all at once.
And I had -- I have in my -- All my previous work,
I always, you know,
kind of scrawled out a script for myself.
And in my head, I knew, you know,
panel to panel, what something was --
a cartoon was going to look like.
Um, but this book was very different in that, um,
I would make an out --
I would make outlines of what was going on with each sister,
you know, year by year,
and decide what had the most emotional weight
from year to year, and what had the most,
like, historical weight, and try to emphasize those things.
Um, but then, uh,
the captions and the word balloons were, um, I mean,
I was literally -- I hate to say this --
I was making it up as I went along.
-[ Chuckles ]
Well, it does --
That's a good way of, um, a little je ne sais quoi,
you know, that kind of, um, that kind of thing.
When I read the book --
When I, um, inhaled the book, as I said,
it made me want to go back and read Nancy Mitford's novels,
and look into her, um, correspondence,
which I think would be so much --
-And what -- I love books of correspondences,
in all of their books of correspondences.
I highly recommend. Their letters to each other
are extremely revealing.
Um, their letters to other people, um --
There's a collection of Jessica's letters,
that's just been reissued as a paperback again,
which is wonderful. And then there's, um,
Nancy's correspondence with Evelyn Waugh,
and, um,
there's Deborah's correspondence with Paddy Leigh Fermor.
-Yeah.
-And they just reveal so much about each of them.
It's amazing.
Maybe sometimes a little more than they would like.
-[ Chuckles ] Yeah.
I loved that collection of Deborah's letters
with Fermor,
um, because just from the title on, you know,
"In Tearing Hurry", I think is the title. Yeah.
-I felt like his letters were full of all kinds
of florid descriptions of people and places,
and hers were like, "Oh, that's interesting.
Got to feed the chickens now."
-[ Chuckles ] Time for tea.
Um, Mimi, thank you for coming on the show.
Um, I have to say, I --
as I started the show,
I'm going to finish it by saying I loved your graphic biography,
"Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me",
and I look forward to your next book, autobiographical.
-Thank you so much. -Yep.
Um, and I hope our paths cross again in this life.
-Thank you. I do, too.
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