Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me

One of modern history’s most flamboyantly dysfunctional families comes to gossipy life in this irresistible biography from Pond (The Customer Is Always Wrong). Born to an aristocratic but insolvent English family in the first decades of the 20th century, the six Mitford sisters grow up sharp-witted, strong-willed, and eccentric. “Deborah, as a child, spent many hours in the family chicken house practicing the exact expression of a hen about to lay an egg,” Pond notes in one of countless bizarre anecdotes. In adulthood, the sisters become a novelist and historian (Nancy), a Communist and muckraking journalist (Jessica), a duchess (Deborah), a poultry breeding enthusiast (Pamela), and Nazi sympathizers (Diana and Unity, whose personal connections with Hitler were scandalous at the time). “They each had a talent for shaping entertaining narratives and for making their lives seem epic,” Pond writes, “which they were.” Pond intermittently compares the Mitfords’ soap-operatic lives with her own upbringing in Southern California in the 1960s and ’70s, dreaming of glamour and longing for even one sister. Her witty art, drawn in inky blue, imbues the characters with personality, and the ingenious page layouts comment on the subject matter: the sisters’ finishing school days, for example, are represented with machinery processing girls for the marriage market. It’s an off-kilter trip through the 20th century that readers won’t want to miss. Agent: Paul Bresnick, Bresnick Weil Literary. (Sept.)