The New York Times, November 2025
Among many other remarkable qualities, Jessica Mitford was a poster girl for collaboration: the creative kind, not the Nazi-nuzzling so notoriously practiced by her sister Unity.
Working on her first memoir, “Hons and Rebels” (1960), about her escape from an eccentric, aristocratic upbringing in the Cotswolds, Mitford shared pages hot from the typewriter with a committee of intimates to see if she could set off what she called a “Roarometer” — make ’em laugh.
“Writing is said to be a lonely task,” she later wrote, as quoted in “Troublemaker,” Carla Kaplan’s doggedly researched and resolutely modern new biography. “I did not find it so.”
Mitford — known as Decca, a childhood nickname — was left-wing activist first and muckraking journalist second, both pursuits aerated by a sense of mischief. Her most successful book, a scathing 1963 exposé of the funeral industry’s pretensions titled “The American Way of Death,” was written with her second husband, Bob Treuhaft, a lawyer and fellow radical “who did not have to grab the microphone” and let her swankier byline prevail at their publisher’s insistence.
