"I was never entirely honest to anyone except for Wadley"
By sally tarbox on 18 April 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
An interesting biography of Marian Barbara ('Joe') Carstairs, daughter of a wealthy but dysfunctional family.
After leaving boarding school, Joe adopts a male persona, and after serving as a driver in the Great War, gets caught up in the 'anything goes' world of the Bright Young Things. When her grandmother dies, she is able to indulge her passion for speed, building and racing boats, before her ultimate challenge - buying her own island in the Bahamas, and running it as her own private country. ("I didn't make improvements...there was nothing there.I just made what I wanted.")

A difficult character to really understand, Carstairs is simultaneously permissive - wild parties, countless lovers - and strait-laced when it comes to supervising her black employees' lives. The author sees her as a Peter Pan type, in her own Neverland, 'a boy who never had to grow up', and I admit to being fazed by the close relationship she seems to have had with her doll, Lord Tod Wadley. As she is so hard to comprehend, perhaps the reader comes away still bemused by her personality, but nonetheless a very interesting read. ( )

This was one of those great finds that I sometimes unearth at the dollar store - the story of "Joe" Carstairs, a wealthy transgender who became famous for racing speedboats and later, buying her own private island in the Bahamas where she constructed her own society living openly with other women/

This was a fascinating look at someone who, if not for her money would have been thought deviant at the time. Instead, she was merely regarded as eccentric. ( )

Das exzentrische Leben der Joe Carstairs

This would have made an interesting news article, but I felt that the book stretched the story too far.

"Joe" Carstairs is essentially unknowable, because she never really let anyone close enough to know her. And from this book she seemed to me afraid to know herself too deeply. She really stuck by her motto of living in the moment.

I think she struggled with knowing whether people were with her for the money or for herself. So she decided to get in first and make it about the money, but she was very generous with her money and life-long loyal to the people she did care about.

I skipped through the pages of poetry and repetitious pages comparing Joe to Peter Pan.

At the end Joe struck me as a rather lonely figure who was perhaps afraid to really grow up. You wonder what would have happened to her if she hadn't had pots of money. With some of her antics she'd have either been in prison or a psychiatric ward. ( )

I liked the subject of this biography so much that I was almost able to ignore the writing. It was patchy, jumpy, and odd. There were bits that made me roll my eyes, and bits that made me hiss- mostly assumptions on the part of the author. I'd like to read an in-depth biography of Carstairs by a genuine biographer rather than an obituary writer, I think, but I'm glad I read this one. ( )