A Charmed Life

In this "poignant" and "lovely" memoir, an earl's daughter describes growing up in legendary Scottish castle with her dysfunctional family ( Entertainment Weekly). We grew up with the same parents in the same castle, but in many ways we each had a moat around us. Sometimes when visitors came they would say, "You are such lucky children; it's a fairytale life you live." And I knew they were right, it was a fairytale upbringing. But fairy tales are dark and I had no way of telling either a stranger or a friend what was going on; the abnormal became ordinary. Liza Campbell was the last child to be born at the renowned Cawdor Castle, the family seat of the Campbells and one of the settings featured in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Liza's father Hugh, the twenty-fifth Thane, inherited dashing good looks, brains, immense wealth, a revered title, three stately homes, and 100,000 acres of land. A Charmed Life is the story of Liza's idyllic childhood with her four siblings in Wales in the 1960s, until Hugh inherited Cawdor Castle and moved his family up to the Scottish Highlands. It was at the historical ancestral home that the fairy tale began to resemble a nightmare. Overwhelmed by his responsibilities, Hugh tipped into madness fueled by drink, drugs, and extramarital affairs. Over the years, the castle was transformed into an arena of reckless extravagance and domestic violence, leading to the termination of a legacy that had been passed down through the family for six hundred years. "As a prose stylist, Liza is comparable to Nancy Astor: wry, deadpan, whimsical." —T he Sunday Telegraph (UK) "Superbly written." — Harper's Bazaar