The House in France

Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter's evocative and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather--Dee Wells, a glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated Oxford philosopher--and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything. Gully Wells takes us into the heart of London's liberated intellectual inner circle of the 1960s, with Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, and others, then in New York, Mayor Lindsay, Mike Tyson, her mother as an outspoken and progressive television commentator, her stepfather--an icon in the world of twentieth-century philosophy--proving himself as prodigious a womanizer as he was a thinker. Throughout, there is La Migoua, the house in France, where her parents and their friends came together and where Gully learned some long-lasting lessons of a life well lived.