With notable, largely historical exceptions, literary lives can be disappointingly dull to read about. Not so Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s. Better Broken Than New is the novelist and memoirist’s first book since 2007 and its vivid, sometimes chaotic narrative details – adventures and misadventures enough for multiple lifetimes – leave the reader wondering not from where she derives her creative material but how she’s lived to tell the tale.
Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the apparently murderous ministrations of a racist maternity nurse: along with infidelities and estrangements, these startling occurrences become almost incidental in a volume whose defining dramas run to kidnapping her own five-year-old daughter and then living under police protection, and fighting off a homicidal gang of home invaders with a hunting knife – in her 60s.
Her beginnings, we learn, were fittingly unconventional. She was conceived in a mental hospital where her beloved mother, Joanna, a three-time divorcee and enduring romantic, was being treated for suicidal depression; her father, Guyanese writer Jan Carew, was seeking help for what was then termed pseudoneurotic schizophrenia.
Having spent much of her pregnancy partially paralysed with what was diagnosed as a hysterical psychosomatic condition, Joanna recovered in time for her youngest daughter’s birth and always credited “Lizzie”, as she was known in childhood, with saving her. In the meantime, Jan’s career had taken off and he’d moved on, leaving Joanna to raise their daughter, along with the three she already had, alone in a shabby flat in Clapham, south London, where money was scant but books were plentiful. Divorced again, she eventually changed their surname from Carew to St Aubin, an allusion to her family’s genteel Jersey roots.
Shortly after she turned 17, Lizzie ditched her nickname, having married Venezuelan bank robber and former political prisoner Jaime de Terán, who was nearly two decades her senior and thought it made her sound like a pet poodle. They shared no common language and he’d whisked her from a south London girls’ school to an isolated Andean plantation – via a two-year “honeymoon” on the run in Europe – before she fully understood how unstable he was. When he informed her that she and their young daughter, Iseult, would be joining him in a murder-suicide pact, she fled back to England with the child and a suitcase full of the literary fragments from which her writing would evolve.
The aristocratic de Terán clan inspired her pungently autobiographical debut novel, a gothic romance with magic realist touches titled Keepers of the House. It was published in 1982 and a year later she appeared on Granta’s inaugural Best of Young British Novelists list, flanked by established, largely male writers including Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. While her penchant for Edwardian gowns helped draw the media’s attention, it was vicarious interest in her private life that held it.
After the success of Keepers of the House, she continued to mine her own life and in addition to eight more novels, published five works of memoir. Inevitably, there are overlaps as she looks back on subsequent decades spent living as a literary hostess in a cursed castle in the Fens with the poet George MacBeth and then as chatelaine of an Umbrian villa with the painter Robbie Duff Scott. With each, she had a child before bolting.
Why the long hiatus in her literary career? It’s one of several enduring lacunae in a warm, shrewd book but she does account for how she’s passed the time. In 2004, she moved to a sleepy Mozambique fishing village with Dutch war correspondent Mees van Deth and set about restoring a ruined palace and trying to establish nursery schools and sustainable tourism businesses. There have, of course, been ample incidents along the way: not just the near fatal robbery but also a devastating cyclone and six nights spent wrongly imprisoned.
In 2021, de Terán returned to London, alone, to live on a houseboat. In an echo of her flight from Venezuela nearly half a century before, she brought with her a cache of literary material, but there was one key difference: instead of fragments, this time she’d assembled completed drafts of this memoir and of a novel to be published later this year. At 70, and with a trail of relinquished, although not regretted roles behind her, she is different, too. As she puts it: “I am who I am, as I am, and I have finished with all pretending.”
• Better Broken Than New: A Fragmented Memoir by Lisa St Aubin de Terán is published by Amaurea Press (£19.95). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
