The Usual Suspects

Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

I've been curious about the Mitfords since my eye was caught by a title on a bookstore display table one day nearly 50 years ago: Poison Penmanship. It was a collection of Jessica's muckraking magazine articles. I bought it. She became a favorite author of mine, and it was from reading her memoirs that I learned that she was called Decca and had five equally colorful but sometimes more alarming sisters.

There have been a number of biographies, individual and joint, but I haven't found the ones I've read particularly compelling. This one, though, was fascinating as well as zippy. I'm not sure what to call the kind of book this is. It looks like a graphic novel, except it's non-fiction. The art is sometimes a little sketchy - I'm not sure I recognize the sisters, much of the time - and it can get very confusing what order to read a page's various captions in.

But it's very well told, going through the entire lives, jumping from one sister to another and concentrating on what they did together, with digressions in the form of visits to the author's own bleak suburban childhood for contrast or comparison, and sidebar-like introduction to other characters or events (treating their only brother that way). It tends to skip over Pam, the least colorful sister, in her earlier years, and it gets overall sketchy near the end, telling what happened without the rich array of anecdotes that enliven the earlier years.

But it tells lots of good stories, only some of which (mostly those involving Decca) I already knew, and brings them to added life with the illustrations. And the jumping-around storytelling style is impressively coherent.

There aren't many factual errors; I only counted a couple. The only one of any significance was the statement that Decca and her husband Esmond met Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer through one of the letters of introduction they carried when they came to the US. They did carry a batch of such letters, but they got to know Meyer through his daughter Kay, whom they'd met at a party and hit it off with immediately. She is mentioned later, where it's noted that she's Katharine Graham, later the famous publisher of the Post herself, but not that she and Decca remained lifelong friends.

Pond is emphatically sympathetic to Decca's time in the Communist Party - they were giving a hoot about social justice when hardly anyone else was - and she tries to be understanding about the eccentricities of the Mitford parents, but her treatment of sisters Diana who became a fascist and Unity who became an outright Nazi and a Hitler groupie is pretty deadpan. This is what they did; comment would be superfluous. And I learned a lot I hadn't known about the personal lives of the remaining sisters, Nancy and Debo.

Very informative, very entertaining, and despite its length a very fast read. Probably the best book-length introduction to the batch of them.