I started this without any burning desire to know more about 'that woman', but quickly became involved in this account of someone whose life came to be defined by her marriage to King Edward VIII. Though I found her on the whole unpleasant - someone who made a career of avoiding a career, by seeking to marry money and status - I eventually came to have a little sympathy for her. It seems she was far from hell-bent on marrying the king. Rather she became unable to avoid it, and both she and her second husband had to conspire to please the clearly unbalanced monarch.

An interesting, rather than an appealing book. ( )

A biography of Wallis Simpson.

A mixture of very interesting facts (I had no idea she was still married to Mr Simpson at the time of the abdication, I always had the impression he was long gone) and wild speculation (she was flat-chested and a graphologist said her handwriting was masculine so she could have been a man with a hormonal disorder). Read with a large dose of salt handy. ( )

A very interesting read about the Duchess of Windsor. I learned things I was unaware of and I think this book portrays Wallis overall in a better light than is normally perceived at least here in the UK ( )

a few interesting parts ( )

Where have all the good biographers gone? I wasn't expecting Doris Kearns Goodwin here, but my heavens- what a slog! Weak writing, abysmal editing, and far too much supposition mean this 'biography' of Wallis Simpson has little credibility. There are many, many things wrong with this book, so I'll focus on just three of it's greatest offenses:

1) While the book is meticulously researched, the editor made no attempt to reign the author in. It's as though we are reading the author's research notes- every single detail Sebba dug up was included, whether or not it was interesting, relevant, or true.

2) Other reviews speak of how the author seemed to dislike the Duchess and painted her as black a villain as possible. I could not disagree more; Anne Sebba came up with every half-baked excuse possible to explain away the terrible behavior of a terrible person. Simpson couldn't help herself because she had no father figure... she was insecure about money because she grew up poor... she was trying desperately to hide the fact that she was a hermaphrodite!!!! Sebba spent over 300 pages pulling excuses out of thin air, despite having little or no evidence to back these claims up.

3) This is one of my personal literary pet peeves; it makes me crazy when an author picks a pet word/phrase (or more than one) and uses it to death. How many times did the author refer to WWII as an 'existential' war? I very much want to say to her, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

I went into this book hoping to find some redeeming qualities in both the Duchess and the Duke, although their infantile private language should've warned me off from the start. But if you threw in some pictures of topless girls, “That Woman” would essentially be a particularly long, tedious issue of The Sun. It seems appropriate, though, for this trashy pair. ( )