A veritable rollercoaster of highs and lows, Cash’s recently published memoir – Restoration Heart – charts the life of a man who doesn’t believe in doing things by half. With a cast straight from a Bystander party list, Restoration Heart reads like a juicy gossip column. From offering to bring up Boris Johnson’s love child as his own to flat sharing with Elizabeth Hurley, Cash’s brutal honesty commands the reader and his droll anecdotes and shameless name-dropping make Restoration Heart immensely readable ... Laugh-out-loud funny, but also desperately sad, Restoration Heart is a delightful true story of love, hope and redemption by one of the foremost society writers of our day.
Both hilarious and dispiriting, Restoration Heart conveys the transformative power of good architecture. With illustrations by the brilliant artist Adam Dant, who worked on murals at the house for years, this book is one to be treasured.
Cash, who has often written of society and scandal, is adept at setting dramatic scenes throughout his memoir. Yet there’s another layer to Restoration Heart—an acute literary sense ... Restoration Heart is buoyed by Cash’s self-effacing humor. He’s a romantic when it comes to love, and also writing ... Cash puts his life—loves, losses, and longings—on display here, and the result is a paean to hard-worn optimism, and an affirmation of the epistle as cherished form.
William Cash is an ambitious and talented writer ... It’s hard to pull the whole truth from a memoir, but Cash attacks Restoration Heart with admirable journalistic remove. He quotes verbatim from letters to paramours rather than attempt to recall his feelings a decade or two later. He crafts vivid, cinematic scenes. He guesses at the motivations behind his own fateful decisions but does not presume to know them for certain. His writing is elegant and self-effacing, sometimes to the point of false modesty. (If Upton Cressett doesn’t qualify as a mansion, as Cash asserts in chapter two, then I’d like to know what does) ... celebrates the redemptive power of love and renovation. It’s a good read for a certain breed of Anglophilic American, those of us who still remember the Reagan-era PBS spectacle of Brideshead Revisited and who treasure our dogeared The Lord of the Rings paperbacks and our dusty Four Weddings and a Funeral DVD.
