I try to make it erotic, too."īorn Jacqueline Jill Collins in London in 1937, her first novel, "The World is Full of Married Men," was a story of sex and show business set in "Swinging London" in the mid-1960s. Sex is a driving force in the world so I don't think it's unusual that I write about sex. Is it going to be my mom? My children? A lot of people say to me, 'Oh, I read your books under a cover with a flashlight when I was really young and I learned everything I know about sex from you.'. I lost my mum to cancer, too.”īut the memoir, Collins said, would also include plenty of the kind of salacious detail used to such riotous effect in the “bonkbuster” genre with which she is so indelibly associated."As a writer, you can never think about who is going to read your books.
When he lost his black, thick curly hair, he didn’t want to go on. Frank came out of the doctor’s office to where I was sitting in the ante room and just said: ‘I’m fucked, I’ve got three months to live.’ Three months later he was gone. I remember taking him to the doctor because he didn’t feel well and had flu and so they took a chest X-ray. He was this handsome Italian who looked like a hero from one of my books. It’s very stressful and you are worried about them all the time and have to make sure they take their meds.
Caregivers who look after someone have a lot on their plate, and I know there’s people out there who would appreciate hearing how I coped with it. “But I wanted to write about the experience of caring. In the past all I’ve said about Oscar and Frank’s deaths is that I wanted to celebrate their lives, not mourn their deaths. “I want to talk about losing my husband and nursing two men through terminal illness because I think it will help people. “But I have so much in my memoir I can talk about.” She was ready, she said, to talk for the first time about the death of her beloved second husband, Oscar Lerman, who died from prostate cancer in 1992, and about her fiancé, Frank Calcagnini, who she lost to a brain tumour six years later – and of what it means to care for a sickly loved one. She was, she said, working on her autobiography, Reform School or Hollywood. And in retrospect, it’s easy to wonder if she was looking back on her life from a new perspective.
But this time she was in a surprisingly reflective and candid mood. Though Collins always gave journalists superb quotes, she nonetheless remained an enigma, giving away little about her private life. Photograph: Richard Young/Rex Shutterstock Jackie Collins and Oscar Lerman at the party in Belvedere hotel, London 1990.
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