It’s certainly why live music was among the things I’ve missed the most in the past few years. That feedback loop between audience and musician generates an incredible and rare energy. But musicians do their tough, creative work and get feedback in real time, for better or worse. Painters don’t have to stand beside their art in a gallery. Writers are generally not present when people are reading their books. When reflecting on books about musicians, I think of the ones that highlight what a daring life it is. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity.Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Ma'am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes.

'Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for decades now. Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma'am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. In her 1950's heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding. 'If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies' he confided to a friend, 'they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!' Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor. A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR 'I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich' Observer She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up.The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix's The Crown.

Ma am darling craig brown