Ivana Lowell: I'm a survivor

I come from a fabled family. My grandmother Maureen was one of the three heiresses the society pages dubbed 'the glorious Guinness girls'; my mother, Lady Caroline Blackwood, was a writer, model and muse to her first husband, the painter Lucian Freud, and my stepfather, the poet Robert Lowell. On paper it all looks so glamorous, so privileged, so interesting. And yet dysfunctional does not even begin to describe my upbringing. 'Gosh,' my latest therapist said to me. 'You've been so bumped and knocked about, it's amazing you' re still standing.'

Yes, so when I became a mother in 1999 I knew I had to do it differently. I started looking back and trying to make sense of the past and I poured it all into a memoir with a title taken from a bleak Robert Lowell poem: Why Not Say What Happened? My maternal grandmother Maureen, Lady Dufferin (she married Basil, the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava), was a vivacious hostess, mentioned in Noël Coward' s song 'I went to a marvellous party': 'We played the most wonderful game/Maureen disappeared/And came back in a beard/And we all had to guess at her name!' She would sometimes greet guests wearing false teeth and a monocle, disguised as her alter ego, a crude Irish maid called Mabel. Mabel would
hustle visitors towards the lavatory, asking if they wanted to go now or later. Maureen was friends with Evelyn Waugh, Frederick Ashton and the Queen Mother (whom everyone called 'Cake' after she once exclaimed the word rather too loudly at a wedding). Maureen had the joie de vivre of the Bright Young Things. But she was also a selfish mother who often left her children in the care of the staff at the family estate, Clandeboye in Northern Ireland. It had a man-made shamrock-shaped lake and was stuffed with treasures brought back from India by my great-great- grandfather, the former Viceroy, but it was a cold and lonely place for children and my mother grew up cripplingly shy.

At my mother's coming-out ball, attended by Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, my grandmother 'overserved' herself champagne and slipped on the dancefloor, cracking the priceless shamrock-shaped family tiara. She never drank again. However, for others of us it was not so easy, drink being 'the family failing' as my mother used to put it, as well as, ironically, the source of our fortune. It is sometimes said there is a curse on the Guinness family. I'm not so sure – look at any large family and you will find tragedy – but for us the combination of money, flamboyancy, alcohol and talent has been, in some ways, a recipe for disaster.

Neglect and carelessness blighted both my childhood and my mother's. She wrote a short story about a creepy groom she had known as a child, called Never Breathe a Word. We don't think he actually molested her, but when I was six, the husband of my nanny started to pay me bedtime visits. We were living in Milgate Park, a huge, gloomy Georgian house in Kent: me, my mother, my stepfather Robert Lowell, whom I adored, my elder sisters Natalya and Evgenia, and my little half-brother Sheridan Lowell. I dreaded going off to my distant bedroom and once I tried an experiment, screaming and screaming to see if anyone could hear me. No one could. When the abuse started, I almost welcomed it. My nanny's husband's visits were wrong, I knew, but I also used to look forward to them. He would tell me I was beautiful and threaten to set his German shepherd on me unless I complied with his sexual demands. It was utterly abusive but it was attention and I think children mistake attention for love.

Our house was hopelessly chaotic, with broken furniture and peeling wallpaper. If a television broke, a new one would be dumped on top of it. When he was four, my brother pulled a heavy Venetian lamp down on himself. 'Gave him a little bit of brain damage,' my mother used to remark jokingly. Nothing was childproof. Aged six, I was running through the kitchen, playing a game with one of the staff called Off Ground He, when I caught the lead of a kettle with my foot. Seventy per cent of my body was burned by scalding water. I remember looking down and just seeing my skin evaporating.

In a specialist burns hospital in East Grinstead, where Battle of Britain bombers had been treated, I was kept in a hermet-ically sealed cold room. My mother and Robert lay on the floor outside the room all night hoping I would survive. I did, but when I left hospital with emaciated, charred limbs, I had to learn to walk all over again. When I got home, my nanny and her husband had moved away: the abuse stopped. A therapist once suggested to me that the accident was my attempt to stop the abuse – it covered the same area of my body. If it was, it was entirely unconscious. The burning was far worse than the abuse.

I longed for normality. When Robert and my mother took me to start school at Dartington Hall, a liberal establishment in Devon, mid-termtime in a rusty old jalopy (cars were one of my mother's few frugal-ities because, as she always said, 'No one has cars these days'), I just knew all the other children had been dropped off by normal parents in normal cars. When we were sitting waiting outside the head-master's office, Robert absent-mindedly picked up one of the milk bottles sitting on the doorstep and started drinking from it. Fortunately, I loved my boarding school, it made me feel safe, and I adored the routine and security.

But back at home, Lady Caroline and her mad poet probably frightened our neighbours. At the end of our drive, a family lived in a mock-Tudor house with a kidney-shaped swimming pool, immaculate lawns and two cars in the garage. To me it represented perfection. I pleaded with Mum to let us visit them, thinking I might be allowed to swim in their pool. It couldn't have gone worse. My mother was drinking again and Robert, frequently in and out of psychiatric hospitals, was entering one of his manic phases. The visit ended with a frigid goodbye. Soon after, our carthorse Paddy (who had once belonged to the Queen) escaped, bolted on to their land and fell into their pool, thrashing about until he was winched out by a fireman's sling, but not before he had managed to smash most of the pool's delicate tiles. 'Magnificent steed!' said Robert proudly.

Soon after, Robert died suddenly of a stroke at 60. He was crossing New York in a taxi, with a portrait of my mother by Lucian Freud in his arms. The next sudden bereavement was my sister Natalya, who developed a drug habit at our 'progressive' boarding school and died, aged 18, of a heroin overdose. She had been poised to enter rehab the next day. The sense that we were doomed was pervasive. For the darkest times, my mother and I found a catchphrase: 'It's too bad, even for us.'

By my late teens my mother and I were best friends and drinking companions. Early in life I learned that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Her attitude was never maternal. She would not have recognised the verb 'to parent'. We never had cooked meals at home, though in town, Harrods Food Hall often delivered. I recently met the writer Paul Theroux, who told me he visited us at Milgate when I and my siblings were little and he wondered how we survived when he saw a fridge with nothing but vodka in it.

I remember falling weeping to the floor of John Lewis once because I wanted regulation nametapes so badly. When I ran away from another boarding school (Cranborne Chase), I was terrified and thrilled: it was like escaping from prison. When I arrived home, my mother simply said: 'Oh, hello, darling, I'm just going out for dinner but don't worry, we'll talk about it tomorrow.'

Perhaps most perniciously, my paternity was left in doubt. I grew up believing my genetic father was my mother's second husband, the composer Israel Citkowitz, although Robert Lowell was a loving adoptive father and gave me his surname (as well as the poem Ivana). Bob Silvers, a friend of my mother, was always a kind fatherly presence, but another candidate was the writer Ivan Moffat, with whom I felt not much affinity, despite the fact we both worked in film (for a time I was an actress, and was Bob Weinstein' s girlfriend, as well as running the Weinstein brothers' Miramax literary arm, publishing books such as a Like Water For Chocolate cookbook). When I became pregnant with my daughter Daisy, now 11, I was 32 and married to Matthew Miller (an interior designer). I decided, finally, that a paternity test was imperative. I needed to know my child' s genetic inheritance – and I also needed something better to say than 'Um Which one?' when therapists asked me about my father. The result was an anticlimax in a way because nothing changed. Ivan Moffat, it transpired, was my father (the clue, I suppose, was in my name). But there was no Hollywood ending, no joyful reunion.

Daisy has a close relationship with her father. We are no longer married but we are both really proud of the fact we have such a good friendship. I missed my father – it's so important she knows and loves hers. We live in my mother's former home in Sag Harbor in the Hamptons and Matthew is close by; he has retrained as a fly fisherman and keeps me in fish.

When I set up home with my daughter I decided to be 'disgustingly normal'. Our house is cosy – we have heating! – and Daisy's nametapes are preordered and sewn into her clothes. If she starts summer camp, she finishes it: running away is not an option. It's essential to try to put right the mistakes that were handed down through the generations, but it's hard to strike the right balance. When she is online I find myself peering over her shoulder. Sometimes I embarrass her like my parents embarrassed me. 'Mummy, you can't go out like that,' she recently told me. 'You look like Lady Gaga!' I was wearing Alexander McQueen boots, very high with a very spiky heel, a short dress and a feather in my hair. I suppose a sense of drama runs in the family. Look at my cousin Daphne, who is famous for her wonderfully outlandish dress sense. My grandmother Maureen' s look was drag queen-meets-aristo. She loved huge, tacky, gaudy earrings – always costume jewellery, though she had 'good stuff' at home – and she loved jewels with a naughty twist, like monkeys who, on close examination, are copulating. My mother was quite different. She was very beautiful when she was younger but she rejected fashion; she was completely without vanity. I never saw her put on so much as face cream. I hope I strike a happy medium.