Why 'kiss and tell' revelations leave women diminished

Julie Kavanagh, the writer and former girlfriend of the novelist Martin Amis, has lifted the lid on the incestuous love-lives of the literati in a "kiss and tell" magazine memoir which recounts Amis' numerous infidelities.

Kavanagh lived with Amis in the mid-1970s. In her article for Intelligent Life, a quarterly magazine for the Economist, she describes Amis' affairs with women including Emma Soames, a grand-daughter of the former Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Kavanagh's best friend before she became Amis's lover.

Kavanagh recounts: "They'd started an affair while I was away on a trip to Israel, a situation I should have seen coming. Not only was she very endearing, Emma was huge fun - much more fun than me."

Amis was also unfaithful with critic Lorna Sage, the former literary editor of the New Statesman, and author Claire Tomalin, and "a bohemian beauty named Lamorna Seale", says Kavanagh. She said he transformed from an insecure "short-arsed" man into a ladykiller in the years after the publication in 1973 of his first book, The Rachel Papers.

"The feeling of profound unattractiveness from which he claims to have suffered a couple of years before we met - feelings of short-arsed, physical inadequacy which he novelises time and again - had given way to Byronic magnetism."

Kavanagh wrote the article with Amis' help. "It could have been so awkward, the experience of revisiting our past for what I suppose is basically a consensual kiss-and-tell." However, the Independent's Liz Hoggard writes: "Every day I open the newspapers to another female writer revisiting her romantic pain. Now Martin Amis' ex-girlfriend Julie Kavanagh has written in great, agonised detail about her love affair with the novelist 35 years ago.

"Not only was he serially unfaithful, he left her for her best friend Emma Soames. Soames has given her version of the love triangle with the 'scribbling dwarf' (as her brother, Tory MP Nicholas Soames, dubbed Amis). And now we're agog to hear that opera diva Anne Howells has written about her affair with a famous, chunky Australian critic for the Oldie (widely assumed to be Clive James).

"What makes a clever, sane woman bare all? Revenge? A desire to pre-empt the male version (Amis is of course bringing out a book he calls 'blindingly autobiographical' next year). Or to kickstart a failing career?

"Kavanagh and Soames are great veteran journalists. So I can't help feeling protective. We all love a bit of confessional. But my problem with these stories is that the woman emerges fatally diminished. Either they've just come across as an acolyte to a Very Significant Man (he's smouldering, Byronic; she washes his socks). Or else they steal the headlines but it colours everything else they ever write again. 'Never become the story' is a pompous mantra. But it holds true."

- INDEPENDENT