Isabella Blow: Distrust the Biography

People say, how are you? And you say, ' Fabulous.' But not Isabella. She'd say- ' Suicidal'

“I want to die,” she would tell her friends, in what seemed, perhaps, like more elaborate hyperbole. How could she, they wondered, as they stood amid the splendid world she’d created for herself, full of beauty and friendship with the witty and the famous, most of whom, quite literally, worshipped at her feet"

How could she? How could they- how do we end up with large pools of people
lying to themselves so often and so vehemently they forget
what it is to be alive? That they do not know
neither money
nor beauty
nor friendships based on parties
can give us meaning

Her friends were concerned, but they were also growing tired of her macabre side... ” As one put it, “Someone finally said, ‘Look, Issie, if you really mean to kill yourself, there’s a pool out back, go drown!’”

These. Are. Not. Friends.
This was a woman deeply, deeply alone.
She came from here:

When Blow was 4 years old, her younger brother drowned in a half-full swimming pool while, as she later recalled, her mother was upstairs putting on lipstick and her father mixing some drinks....Blow’s parents never recovered from the tragedy, and her mother eventually left when Blow was 14. “It was literally a handshake and then she was off,” says Detmar. “The stepmother came with three daughters and sort of said to Issie, ‘Okay, then. You’re out.’”

and ended up with this man:

“She said, ‘Samo,’ which is ‘same old shit,’ which is all that Basquiat ever said,” Detmar ( her husband) says. “It’s not the most original thing for her to have said, but that’s what she said. Samo. ( he comments on her ORIGINALITY )I finally said, ‘Okay, I’ll move out,’ and I rented a flat in Shoreditch, which is very fashionable.” He also had some affairs, most famously with Stephanie Theobald, a supposedly lesbian writer.

“I had a lot of loneliness,” he says, defending himself. “Issie was always working. I had to schedule time with her, so I always had these platonic crushes. Because I was married to Issie, I got much prettier dates than I ever could have on my own.” (!!!!)

Blow, for her part, retaliated with the gondolier and his bulging white pants, but in the end, she told her friends that he stole a lot of her money and wasn’t good for much else.

Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow, is co-written by Isabella's husband of 18 years, Detmar Blow ( would you like your cheating ex-husband to write your autobiography? ) due 2010

She could not have the babies she wanted. She thought of herself as hideously ugly. She was
abandoned by her father, cast out of her own home. She was cheated on and lied to and clinically depressed. She jumped off a bridge and shattered many bones in her long body. What is the real story of Isabella Blow? And how will we know if her husband tells us her life?

What is the real story of Isabella Blow?

* all quotes from NYT