Barbara Amiel's "Friends and Enemies" a great read

Barbara Amiel’s bestseller, “Friends and Enemies: A Life in Vogue, Prison & Park Avenue,” is a beautifully written memoir that I could not put down. I knew it would be interesting, given the grand opera that has been her life, but I was surprisingly captivated by its wit, social insights and, above all, bravery.

She pulls no punches concerning her enemies, but also concerning herself. In this respect, her memoir sets a new standard as an unreserved, self-deprecating narrative. Born in Britain, she was neglected by self-absorbed parents, then immigrated to Hamilton, Ont., at a young age. As a result, she desperately pursued emotional connections and social acceptance as an adult, leading to years of abusive relationships, clinical depression and an intermittent addiction to over-the-counter narcotics.

Her personal difficulties make her accomplishments all the more gob-smacking. At 14, she was asked to leave home by her mother and stepfather, but, in British stiff-upper-lip fashion, she writes: “I parted from my family at first involuntarily when I was 14, leaving the younger and more withdrawn (sister) Ruth behind, and then off and on depending on (my mother’s emotional state), quite happily renting different rooms until my last year in high school. No one told me how lives were supposed to be, and so I didn’t feel shortchanged.”

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She attended school, wrote for a local newspaper and held part-time jobs to support herself, eventually earning a scholarship to the University of Toronto. Despite her demons, and bad marriages, she became a trailblazing magazine writer, columnist and award-winning author.

In 1992, she married Conrad Black, along with his social position in Britain as a newspaper baron and peer. This plunged her into London’s treacherous social scene of royalty, aristocrats, politicians and Fleet Street scoundrels. Simultaneously, the two swam with social sharks in Palm Beach, Fla., and on Park Avenue in New York. The book is leavened with terrific set pieces about high society as acutely drawn as Edith Wharton’s stories about the lives, attitudes and morals of New York aristocracy in the Gilded Age.

Amiel excoriates many, by name, but also herself for being unable to regulate her insecurities and compulsion to dress, walk, talk and entertain like unaccomplished and vacuous women. But in 2003, their life came to a crashing halt when activist shareholders, and then the U.S. legal system, attacked Black’s businesses.

The second part of the book documents her Wagnerian downfall — socially, financially, legally and psychologically — that lasted years and stripped them of their wealth and ended in her husband’s imprisonment. The fascinating details of characters, treacheries and legal battles is a cautionary tale for anyone doing business south of the border. To me, American justice is an oxymoron, as it is punitive, hideously expensive, racist, biased and politicized.

“We had no great stashes of cash and no preparation for the onslaught,” she writes. Black’s assets and companies were seized, which prevented them from raising funds to fend off legal attacks. In the end, she says they were left with inadequate counsel in court, one of whom routinely nodded off during the proceedings, according to Amiel and others.

Lord and Lady Black were shunned in New York and London, but also in Toronto “among the circles in which my husband had moved since childhood.” Fortunately, she staved off depression during her husband’s incarceration and was able to push to get his conviction reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court. This led to most charges being overturned and a sizeable reduction in his sentence. In 2010, he was released early and in May 2019, President Donald Trump pardoned him. Black described all the charges as “nonsense.”

There is no happy ending, but the nearly 80-year-old Amiel has had the very last word. Deploying her uncommon talent as a wordsmith, she has written a memoir that is a testament to her fearlessness in facing and admitting her own demons as well as in exposing the foibles, cruelty and failings of others.

Bravo, Barbara.