Martin Amis stole my life He distorted our romance for profit

“This is the story of a sexual trauma,” writes Martin Amis, opening his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow. “He wasn’t at a tender age when it happened to him. It was the opposite of torture, yet it twisted. It ruined him for twenty-five years.” It’s a characteristic Amis start, but for me it’s more than fiction. 2010 also marked the 25th anniversary of my first meeting with Martin. Our relationship, if that’s what it was, lasted five or so years. There was no formal conclusion, no disagreement, no announcement. I just left London. We both moved on.

In Martin’s head, however, it lasted forever. During those five years, we’d occasionally written to each other. I stuffed his nine, mostly brief letters into a dog-eared C4 envelope I secreted beneath a pile of cashmere jumpers. At times brimming with affection, and at others detached, his letters had an electromagnetic field of sorts, a humming energy that somehow never faded. Ultimately, I hated them for everything they’d come to represent — in particular, his lies and the betrayal of the intimacy we’d shared. So when, last year, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin expressed an interest in the letters, I didn’t hesitate. Amplified by secrecy, they’d come to feel like a burden.

Commissioned to interview Martin for a music magazine, I first appeared on his doorstep in early 1985. I was 19 and he’d married for the first time only months before. As I clambered up the steep steps of his Leamington Road Villas flat, I was far from prepossessing. My hair, hacked with household scissors in the bathroom, was green. I’d attempted to restore it to its natural brown with box dye after experimenting with bleach and orange henna before that. My spectacles were NHS. I wore my uniform: black polo neck, short kilt, black tights, black ballet flats.

Martin and I were never “together”, per se. After our first kiss, we connected when I happened to be in London. Over those years, I pinged from Oxford to Sydney to Cambridge to London to Sydney to London to Sydney again. I was twice engaged to other men, and dated various others. In between these relationships, I would return to Martin’s flat and for long, indolent afternoons we’d talk, play Scrabble, and read poetry to each other. We drank — almost always vodka — and smoked the countless cigarettes that, in 2023, finally killed him.

In his fiction, Martin imagined we did more. As he wrote in London Fields, published two days after my 24th birthday: “The only one she kept going back to, the only one who was half a match for her, ‘the only one I’ve ever been stupid for’, the handsomest, the cruellest, the best in bed (by far): he’s called MA. A resident of West London.”

In reality, I never once ventured beyond his kitchen — a metaphor, really. Martin and I only ever kissed; I never permitted him to go any further, as his letters confirm. For one, I was far too disordered. My grandmother, whom I adored and who helped raise me, had died after a long battle with cancer; my father, who had sexually molested me, would soon be institutionalised for paranoid schizophrenia. Unable to metabolise the grief, I’d attempted suicide a number of times. Martin, who knew this, wove it all into his fictional universe. “Now the little puppy lay in the arms of his mistress,” he explained in Einstein’s Monsters (1987). “His senses all had missions: to find his way through the veils of her grief and, perhaps, to assuage it.”

Over the decades, in fact, Martin would mine my childhood, my traumas, and my relationships for his fiction. As he explained in one of the letters, all he could write about was his life and, whether I liked it or not, I was part of his life. My anger sits in contrast to my memories of laughing beside Martin on the sofa as darkness fell, a bookcase at one end of the room and curtainless windows at the other. He remembered it all too. As he wrote in London Fields: “She would know what you could get away with in the curtainless room, what adulteries, what fantastic betrayals.”

Martin returned, time and again, to that room and to those afternoons in his fiction: the fundamentally inaccessible woman, often in black; the long, deliriously detailed descriptions of (actual) kisses and paradoxically truncated accounts of (imagined) sex; love as an internalised, rather than shared, experience, secretive, unrelated to marriage, predominantly experienced in recollection, and always, always ending in sadness.

“He loved her from his distance, a love instant and wordless and full of hunger,” is how Martin put it in Einstein’s Monsters. “He would exchange the pigments and the pain of life — and all its great presentiments — for a single caress of her hand.” It was, he added, a love he would never show. Christopher Hitchens, Martin once told me, was the only person who knew about us. In this hidden world, we danced like wild things by his record player. This was misinterpreted by Amber Heard in the film adaptation of London Fields as sinuous, performative. The reality could not have been more different. I would bounce about the room, whooping and waving my hands in the air, as he intently danced beside me.

In Attachment (2008) by Isabel Fonseca, Martin’s second wife, the protagonist discovers, through a note — written from “Thing 1” to “Thing 2” — that her husband is obsessed with a tattooed 19-year-old Italian-Australian from New South Wales. It was this that made me understand that Isabel, who, after I left for Sydney, became Martin’s mistress, had cobbled together an understanding of our relationship from my letters to him, letters for which she had clearly searched after intercepting a note I’d written. As it happens, the note was to “Thing 1” from “Thing 2” — our nicknames for each other.

In general, Martin’s letters were casually intimate, albeit in the cautious, characteristically paternalistic tone he always adopted with me. I’ll never forget the handwriting: constricted, neat, spiky. The Observer letterhead, plain typing paper, and his personal stationery. Inside the envelopes: a photobooth picture of Martin in his youth, magazine articles about him, the residue of rusting paperclips.

We never wrote each other love letters. Yes, he signed one of his letters “love, love, love”, but we never used the word in person. Why would we? Unlike Isabel, I was never in love with Martin, and nor did I want anything from him. I even refused the money he offered me for cab rides. Yet like so many other moments — when I mouthed “You. Always you.” through his car window to him outside Westbourne Park Station one wintry evening, or when I told him that my mother had said I had the mouth of a whore — this became part of his fictional universe.

Throughout Martin’s work, the number 19 in relation to women — not just my age when we met but also the day of the month I was born — features heavily. So too do the black dresses, the pale skin, the compulsive smoking, the inadvisable drinking, the humour, the pseudonyms, the love of music, the Catholicism, the lopsided smile, the small tattoo, the theme of death, details about my body, my lingerie, our kisses. Episodes from my life — the wet railway platform with a suitcase full of shoes, the unexpected white dress, the white bathing costume, my embarrassment at my handwriting, my sexual withholding, my appetites — hundreds of facts, words, and moments: intimacies appropriated by him without acknowledgment or consent.

“No one knew better than I did how hopeless she was at love,” Martin wrote in House of Meetings (2006). “The awful way she laid herself open. She was a totalist among men who dealt in fractions.”

Taken together, in fact, Martin stole so many details from my life that I could be accused of plagiarising if I ever wrote a bildungsroman based on my late adolescence and early 20s. The pain this caused, his betrayal of our intimacy for profit, forever changed me. I became suspicious in relationships, untrusting, watchful. If a man I liked revealed himself as any kind of writer, I recoiled. I fielded comments by those who recognised me from his books. Whenever a new Amis novel was announced, I would be overwhelmed by dread: how would the tenderness we’d shared be further distorted by him for profit?

As a writer, I understand that it is impossible to avoid borrowing details from reality. As Martin correctly pointed out, I was part of the only life he had. But is it fair to be repeatedly — over the course of one’s entire adult life, as it happens — twisted, maligned, exploited in print out of vengefulness simply because his desires had not been fulfilled? Martin, after all, had never forgiven me for falling passionately in love with Michael VerMeulen, the late American-born editor of British GQ. I still remember his incredulity when I showed him my exquisite Tiffany engagement ring. In one letter, he half-jokingly asked what Michael was like in bed. Glittering with hostility, references to Michael thread throughout his later letters.

Martin was aware that I wanted no public connection with him. Had I done so, I would have behaved very differently, accepting the work he had offered me, seeking to strengthen our connection, sleeping with him, desiring to be associated with him — rather than, say, deliberately walking at a distance from him when he took me out to lunch. To me, Martin was, or so I thought, a hidden place of emotional safety, a dream I never wanted to become real.

Inside Story (2020), Martin’s last novel, changed everything. In it, he made the tattooed, Catholic, foreign-born anti-heroine — another character clearly based on me — a former escort. “I want you to know that you can say anything you like about me,” the character says. “Anything.” Of course, it wasn’t true. But realising that media figures who’d heard about us would assume that it was, I snapped, enraged, and wrote a newspaper story. Industry insiders gleefully waited for what they assumed was the inevitable lawsuit, if only to prove I was delusional, a deranged fantasist. Our letters ensured that this would never happen. There was no legal action, then, only more of his lies.

So was Inside Story‘s Phoebe Phelps based on me? As I asked in the piece: “Well, exactly how many unknown, five-year relationships with busty, slender, reckless, foreign-born, tattooed, playful, ravenously smiling Catholic smokers with hennaed hair and with whom he was obsessed for decades has Martin had?”

Despite my story, I do not appear anywhere in Martin’s biographical material. I remain the invisible woman, the Other Woman, whose existence must be erased in order to maintain the celebrated fictions of Martin’s life. This, then, is the antiquated covenant by which “muses”, reluctant or willing, must abide. Through art, as the writer Vanessa Springora observed, a woman may still be “owned” through the desire, even if it is not reciprocated, of a powerful man.

I ended my 2020 piece by stating I never wanted Martin to write about me again. He never did, nor did he ever write another novel. My fiancé and I were staying at the Radisson Blu Edwardian at Canary Wharf the night Martin’s death was announced. He broke the news to me, expecting tears, but all I experienced was an overwhelming sense of relief. I was glad Martin was dead. Four decades of literary obsession had come to an end. Fedexing Martin’s letters to Texas felt like an exorcism. By becoming historical artefacts, they have, at last, liberated me from his lies.