This relentless introspection comes at the expense of a more detailed survey of Birkin’s early career. “In 10 years I’m finished, no one will love me anymore, I’ll be old and ugly,” she writes at just 27. She frets that her beauty is her only currency, so growing old becomes terrifying. “I’m his doll completely re-makeable with better materials.” Insecurity, verging on self-loathing, becomes the dominant tone of Birkin’s memoirs. “He said last night that I drank only because he let me drink, that I lived only because he let me live,” she writes in 1974. Her relationship with Gainsbourg, 18 years her senior, is more warmly painted, yet there are uncomfortable echoes of Pygmalion as the older singer attempts to take credit for her success. The age gap between her and her first husband (she is 18, he 33 when they marry) is insurmountable the composer quickly becomes cold and distant before leaving her with their baby daughter. If this conceit sounds childlike, it’s perhaps because Birkin is constantly infantilised by the men in her life. Her musings are directed to Munkey, the stuffed toy that stays at her side as the diary skips into adulthood, from first film auditions to her marriage to Bond maestro John Barry, then through the highs and wine-drenched lows of her 13-year romantic and creative partnership with Serge Gainsbourg. It’s ironic that this icon of French style had such a patrician British upbringing, between Chelsea and the Isle of Wight. Her father David was a naval officer who assisted the Free French during World War II her mother was Judy Campbell, stage actress and muse to Noël Coward. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTīirkin’s diaries, first published in her adoptive homeland of France in 2018, begin as a jumble of childhood scribbles about family and her Blyton-esque boarding school.

Munkey Diaries by Jane Birkin