A wonderfully original, warm and witty account of London over the past 3 decades that simultaneously charts the author's rise from incidental tourist to internationally renowned agony aunt. Irma Kurtz arrived in London from New Jersey in the late 1950s. Horrified by the postwar drabness, she fled to Paris, city of romance - and heartbreak . She returned to London in 1963, and her renewed encounter with the city developed into a slow-burn love affair. Irma's witty and percipient observations of contemporary London provide stepping stones into the past, and so both her own amazing life story and that of the metropolis unfurl before us in Dear London. Rebel and free spirit par excellence, her recollections create a vivid portrait of the Age of Aquarius; and her early career is a highly entertaining helter-skelter through the Central Office of Information, Raymond's Revue Bar and life at England's first girlie magazine, King before a post at the innovative Nova magazine set her on a course that she would pursue with huge success.

After more than thirty years as an expatriate, Irma Kurtz gave in to her growing curiosity about her American roots and set off on a grand adventure to explore 'the most baffling of all places' - by Greyhound bus. Taking only the barest necessitites for travel, she entered the vast network of America's bus routes and a seething, fleeting world of brief encounters and changing landscapes.

A memoir from Irma Kurtz, the author of "The Great American Bus Ride" and internationally renowned agony aunt. In 1954 18 year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. She looked to the Old World for an alternative destiny to that mapped out by the traditional expectations at home. On her post-war grand tour she found what she believed in: art and culture, and beauty and love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction. Two years ago, sifting through a cardboard box filled with memories at her mother's house, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, the one that marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by intense recollections of sailing across the Atlantic, and intrigued by the exuberant remarks of her adventurous younger self, she decided to leave her London home and retrace her footsteps, this time with herself as a guide. Testing her theory that older women are invisible, Kurtz's journey is peppered with acute observations of human behaviour, not to mention some sharp advice for her ghostly travel companion, a teenager who t

As Cosmopolitan's professional agony aunt for the last forty years, Irma Kurtz has had to deal with the most intimate problems of successive generations of readers, while having to keep up with the changing mores and attitudes in British and American society. In these memoirs, she looks back on the seismic transformations that have taken place over the last four decades, as well as her own hectic and often difficult life as a single mum from America living in London. Warm, funny and perceptive, brimming with wisdom and insight, My Life in Agony is a meditation on the subjects that tend to concern and confuse us the most - from mother-daughter relationships through to eating disorders, office politics and those perennial areas of interest: love and sex.