KEY POINTS:
There's no doubt Sophie Dahl has been genetically blessed. From her mother Tessa she inherited her supermodel looks, from her grandfather, Roald, the ability to tell a story. But if her novel, the semi-autobiographical Playing With The Grown Ups (Bloomsbury, $35) is anything to go by, Dahl's childhood was far from blessed.
Dahl's first proper novel - her first The Man With The Dancing Eyes was a short, sweet fairytale for grown ups - turns around Kitty who is torn from her secure life in her grandparents' English country home by an unstable, beautiful mother who flees to New York to be near her guru. Poor Kitty is consigned to a hideous boarding school and then to an American commune where she chants and meditates a lot with her mixed up mother.
In some ways it's a glamorous life. "Her mother seemed to have friends wherever she went," writes Dahl, "tanned women with gold jewellery and houses that had belonged to Rudolph Valentino or Gloria Swanson. Kitty stole up to their bathrooms and tried on dusky scents with names like Giorgio or Poison."
But while Mother is gorgeous, captivating and bohemian she is also a train wreck with appalling parenting skills. She tells Kitty she's fat, steals her friends and ends up taking drugs with her.
The parallels with Dahl's life can't be ignored - her weight battle, the peripatetic childhood, the bohemian mother with a drug problem.
Composing this coming-of-age story, all Dahl had to do was remember seeing her mother Tessa hospitalised with a drug overdose.
Knowing anything about Dahl's life, then looking for parallels can get in the way of the story.
"My big hope is readers can get beyond that and become involved in the story rather than thinking, `Wow, I wonder if that really happened,' and `Who's that?" Dahl has said. "The parallels are obvious but there's also a lot of fiction."
If you're not au fait with the supermodel's past then the narrative seems gappy, as if there's something the reader isn't privy to. There's also a dislocation between the young Kitty and the grown-up version who appears throughout the book in "flash forwards".
That said, Dahl isn't just another supermodel who thinks she can write. She has loads of talent. There's a fey, childlike quality to her style and she plays with words to good effect.
Kitty's grandfather is described as having a "voice like the beginnings of a bonfire".
What Sophie does next depends on two things - how much more of her own life is left to pillage and how good she is at making things up. But she shouldn't go back to the catwalk. Not just yet.
- Detours, HoS
