Ready For Absolutely Nothing: ‘If you like Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner, you’ll like this’ The Times

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When that marriage proposal never showed up, she dated Imran Khan -then a gorgeous playboy cricket player and now the Prime Minister of Pakistan, before meeting her husband. The first page of Susannah Constantine’s autobiography, Ready for Absolutely Nothing, does an admirable job of setting the tone.

Ready for Absolutely Nothing’ by Susannah Constantine Book ‘Ready for Absolutely Nothing’ by Susannah Constantine Book

Susannah comes across as a resilient, funny and reflective woman who isn’t afraid to lay out her faults and also laugh at herself. This darkly funny, confessional memoir from the star of What Not to Wear tells all: from her posh upbringing and the dishy details of her career in fashion to her journey as a recovering alcoholic. Loved the stories of aristocratic life but I so so wanted this to include her friendship and career with Trinny.

Susannah Constantine is a novelist, journalist broadcaster and podcaster with over 25 years experience in the media and 50 years of f**k ups under her belt. I won't spill the beans here, but they involve gastrointestinal functions, a public bathroom, and in one case- Princess Margaret. I laughed a lot listening to the various pickles she got herself into and really enjoyed her use of language and turn of phrases.

Ready For Absolutely Nothing - Penguin Books UK

She deals very frankly with her own alcoholism, but it was still a bit disjointed from the rest of her life. The result is a rather excellent insight into a time/place in culture that continues to hold endless fascination. There were nannies – one, Linda, turned out to be moonlighting as a prostitute; Constantine remembers sitting on a toadstool in Biba while she perused the racks of hip clothes; and then there was boarding school (St Mary’s in Wantage, Oxfordshire, “well known for accepting any old thicky … I don’t remember any student going on to university unless they had detoured via a London crammer”). The first half of this memoir covering her upbringing and love affair with Princess Margaret's son (and also becoming friends with the princess) was fairly interesting but the second half was a little scattered and uneven.But I don’t know, for all that it must have been lucrative, that it made her happy, even if it was only after it ended that her boozing began in earnest (she once appeared drunk on QVC). Add in weekends at Balmoral witnessing Thatcher and the Queen battle for power, plus time for falling in love, Strictly dancing debuts and a spot of wild swimming. Other people have done far greater justice to this book than I can but it is an extremely good read from a woman born into a wealthy family at a time when a woman’s role was simply to marry into a good family and not be expected to amount to a great deal.