Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me

Mimi Pond crafts a gorgeous, dazzling biography of the Mitford Sisters Born with pedigrees but without the pocketbooks to match, The Mitfords were certainly no strangers to lies, intrigue, or scandal. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. All six sisters were weaned on their family's well-documented upper class eccentricities: a ne'er do well would-be entrepreneur father; a stern, stiff-upper-lipped mother; a revolving door of governesses of varying propriety, all against the backdrop of a crumbling estate falling into disrepair. The sisters grew from cloistered turn-of-the-century country girls into debutantes who would marry into political influence--for better or worse. Is it any wonder that a young, working class Mimi in Southern California becomes enamored with The Mitfords' downright fanciful rich-and-famous lifestyle? This charming, inventively cartooned, and lovingly researched biography captures the dramatic, over-the-top antics of high society's strongest personalities as they rubbed elbows with some of history's most infamous fascists and communists. Pond's genius for classic cartooning in the vein of the Vanity Fair caricature and the satirical illustrations of Charles Addams brings the aesthetic decadence of the 1920s and '30s to life with effortless aplomb, warts and all.

About the Author :
Mimi Pond is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer. She has created comics for the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications. She has also written for television: her credits include the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", and episodes for the television shows Designing Women and Pee Wee's Playhouse. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the painter Wayne White.

Review :
"An imaginative, often cinematic romp...Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me sprawls with spats, rifts, scandalous affairs, and political intrigue."-Robert Ito, The New York Times "Pond's witty visuals and sharp prose make Do Admit the best group biography of the Mitford Sisters to date."-Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times "Irresistible."-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "A spectacular, dizzying romp through the tumult of the twentieth century. Her kinetic drawings and boisterous, endlessly inventive layouts somehow bring coherence to the sprawling, branching plots of her subjects' lives. The visual world Pond creates is phantasmagoric, drawing on deep veins of vintage graphic design. And her grip on the words is equally deft. She's clearly spent so much time steeping in the rich textual legacy that this family has left the world--their books, letters and secret family lingo--that she begins to sound suspiciously like a seventh member of this sophisticated and scandalous sorority. Brava." --Alison Bechdel, Fun Home "Whether you know nothing (or everything) about the infamous Mitfords you will be wildly entertained by this exhaustive tome about them. A massive work almost big enough to encompass the enormous egos and lives of these fascinating (and sometimes frightening) woman. Told with wry charm and wit (the kind the Mitfords themselves might have appreciated) and endlessly visually-inventive. It is the sort of historical biography that will remind you that, yes, truth is always stranger than fiction." --Seth, Clyde Fans "Mimi Pond's Do Admit is a dazzling, acrobatic swirl of graphic invention. It mingles the fascinating story of the famous, fabulous sisters with scenes from the author's glamour-starved childhood in 1950s San Diego. Pond's dry humour fits seamlessly with that of her eccentric British characters, but she is at her empathetic best portraying the heartbreaking losses and turns of fortune they endure. Her love for them shines forth from every page." --Maurice Vellekoop, I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together "An expansive graphic history rendered in washes of Prussian Blue that dissolve the temporal boundaries between Pond and the sisters."-Andi Zeisler, Salon