by Wendy Leigh
I am glad to have met and spent time with Prince Charles’s late valet Stephen Barry, who confided details of his life with Charles and Princess Diana to me in a press interview, and to Diana’s brother Earl Spencer, who took me on a tour of Althorp, and from a distance showed me the island where Diana was buried in a mausoleum.
Georgiana of course is far removed from Princess Diana, but Diana is, nonetheless, one of my inspirations for Georgiana, along with Princess Grace, whose biography I wrote, plus countless other brave and beautiful divas with a wicked streak. All of them are Georgiana, and so, on a good—and bad—day, am I . . .
Like Miranda, I’m a ghostwriter, albeit one who generally has her name on the book, and I’m grateful for the experience I’ve gleaned from ghosting One Lifetime Is Not Enough for the immortal Zsa Zsa Gabor, then in her prime, and who was my deus ex machina, without whom I never would have come to America in the first place—when I was twenty-four, armed with just four hundred dollars and an idea for a sex book; thanks, too, to the other subjects whose books I’ve ghosted: Madonna’s brother, Christopher; I Dream of Jeannie’s blonde bombshell, Barbara Eden; and Shirley Jones, not just Mrs. Partridge but also one of the great stars of musical theater.
Thanks to Anne Rice, an iconic writer far ahead of her time and whose Sleeping Beauty quartet, written under the nom de plume of A. N. Roquelaure, remains an inspiration to millions.
My gratitude to Freud’s natural heir the distinguished Viennese psychoanalyst Dr. Erika Padan Freeman, who, when I was very young, made the immortal pronouncement to me, “You live your life like a novelist,” and who went on to give me the gift of posing this question: “Should purple feel guilty if it had blue in it?”
I owe much of this book to my memories of my father, who, like his great-great-uncle, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, understood that in sex there are no absolutes, and that there is no normal.
One of my father’s favorite songs was “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” and I’ve always wondered why no one ever wrote an equivalent “To All the Men I’ve Loved Before.”
In that spirit, there would have been no Unraveled trilogy, no Robert Hartwell, and definitely no Miranda Stone without all the men I’ve loved before. Dominant in life, if not necessarily in bed, they are all—to paraphrase one of my own favorite songs, “The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”—there in every line of glory and pain. And each one, in his own time, truly was the best thing that ever happened to me.
They say that all life is the good luck or the ill luck of whom we meet when. Once upon a time, an innocent five-year-old child had a chance meeting that was to brand her forever, but without which her life would have unfolded very differently.
Last, but not least, my gratitude to E. L. James, who freed all of us from our prisons of aloneness and gave us permission to live out our wildness without shame and to soar at last.
Don't miss the rest of the Unraveled Series by Wendy Leigh!
When Miranda, a free-spirited celebrity ghost writer, meets notorious billionaire Robert Hartwell, will she get swept up into a dark world of passion and glamour?
Unraveled by Him
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Download the sequel to the sexy, alluring Unraveled By Him, today! On sale now!
Unraveled by Her
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About the Author
WENDY LEIGH is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen books, including Bowie, Prince Charming: The John F. Kennedy Jr. Story, and The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe & Jacqueline Kennedy, and the coauthor of Life with My Sister Madonna, Jeannie Out of the Bottle, and Shirley Jones.
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ALSO BY WENDY LEIGH IN THE UNRAVELED SERIES
Unraveled by Her*
Unraveled by Him*
(*Collected in the volume Miranda Unraveled)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2016 by Wendy Leigh
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First Pocket Star Books ebook edition January 2016
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ISBN 978-1-5011-1114-3
