In “The Snow Queen”, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, a splinter from a magic mirror ends up in the eye of a boy, Kai. Made by a troll, this mirror distorts as it reflects, magnifying the bad and erasing the good.
Liz Jones sees the world through a similar filter. In her new autobiography, Girl Least Likely To, pitched as advice on how not to be a woman, she amplifies every small slight while every joy is diminished. She confesses: “Nothing was ever good enough for me.”
Jones – fashion editor of the Daily Mail and mad monarch of confessional journalism – is well known for her self-loathing. And it’s displayed here in abundance. She is “in doubt” about her “right to be alive”. Her appearance turns her stomach. “I am unlovable,” she declares, after her marriage collapses.
What is strange is how this is coupled with a clear self-regard. After all, what more powerful way is there to say one’s life matters than to write an autobiography? And Jones is so self-obsessed that she always seems to put herself at the centre of everything. In an article for the Mail in 2011, she retraced the last steps of the murdered landscape architect Joanna Yeates, somehow making this young woman’s death about herself.
In the autobiography, this manifests itself largely in a belief that the whole world is in cahoots against her. When out dancing as a teenager, she is told that her grandfather has been knocked off his bicycle and killed. Jones’s reaction? Irritation that her mother makes her leave the nightclub and that the boy she likes then kisses someone else: “I learned I was never, ever going to get what I really wanted.” On 11 September 2001, much of the fashion press is at New York Fashion Week and witnesses the twin towers collapse. Jones is envious of these other editors, who are part of “this momentous occasion”.
Knowing Jones’s columns, I had expected to be irritated by her book. What I hadn’t expected was to be bored. The sections on her early childhood are so drenched in self-pity as to be draining.
Later, I started to feel sorry for her. Every experience she has with a man – from the boy in the playground who assaults her to her adulterous husband – is awful. And her life has been ruled and ruined by anorexia. Yet this suffering inspires little empathy with others. Even though she hates her own looks, she doesn’t seem to have any qualms about criticising the appearance of other women.
Her best writing is on the fashion industry: the way journalists are bought with freebies, the industry’s cruelty to animals and the branding of waiflike models as “fat”. On the designer John Galliano’s anti-Semitism trial, she raises questions about the duty of care of his ex-employer Dior.
As Jones’s miseries play out in public, that is something the Daily Mail should consider, too. Her writing doesn’t feel cathartic. Like her starving herself, it feels like self-harm.
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