‘Opening up felt hard... like being beaten up by my dad'

With a new memoir from the doyen of glossy magazines, Olivia Petter expected the glitzy, entertaining and sometimes salacious ride. But she didn’t expect to be moved to tears

- Olivia Petter

It might seem easy to foresee what a magazine mogul like Dylan Jones would include in his memoir. Celebrity parties starring some of the biggest names in the ’biz. Salacious stories about politicians and major media types. The veritable highs and lows of running a glossy magazine for more than two decades. You expect to laugh, goggle and cringe. What you do not expect, perhaps, is to cry.

This is what happened with me, I tell him. “Oh!” he says, more than a little surprised, as we settle into a meeting room in the offices of the Evening Standard, where he has been editor-inchief since June 2023 – a major shift from his 22-year-long tenure as editor of British GQ. Jones’s CV is not what moved me, though. Because beneath the glitz and the gloss – all of which is there – are insights into an incredibly abusive childhood, and the revelation that he was raped at 17 years old, something he’d never previously disclosed. In the book, he confesses that he found the process of opening up on the page difficult. “The whole thing felt unnecessary, like being beaten up by my father,” he writes.

But Jones seems confused by my response, as if he didn’t expect me to acknowledge the emotional elements of his book – or at least not at first. As the author of 27 other titles, Jones is no stranger to long-form writing. From David Bowie and U2 to Jim Morrison and David Cameron, the 64-year-old has covered a gamut of subjects that span pop culture to politics. Writing about himself, though, had never really been a part of the plan. “It wasn’t my idea,” the 64-year-old says of the memoir he has now written, titled These Foolish Things. “When I left Condé [Nast, the publishing company that owns GQ], my agent suggested it and I said no. It didn’t really sit easily because it felt a bit, ‘me, me, me’.”