Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is Molly Parkin, the Grand Dam of Bohemian Living.

She made her name as a painter, designer and fashion editor, writing for Nova, Harper's Bazaar

in the Sunday Times, but she became notorious for her hedonistic personal life.

Hanging out till the wee small hours in Soho and Chelsea with musicians and

artists and reveling in years of heavy drinking and debauchery. Her lifestyle was

ruinous physically and financially and she ended up being declared bankrupt.

Above all else at 79 years old she is a survivor.

Sober for more than two decades she continues to create,

painting or sewing every day.

I haven't had a drink or a cigarette or slept with a stranger, which I did on a daily basis,

for more than 21 years now, she says.

Giving up the drink means I know what I am doing day and night.

Is it important to you, Molly Parkin, to feel that you have lived a life that is vivid and full of color and richness. Is that where the

delight comes from for you? I think I'm a typical product of my Welsh Valley. I've also got Romani

blood and the Celts are a nomadic race so I have actually had 54 homes in adult years and I have been blessed to have made it my business to surround myself with larger-than-life

characters. I've learned a lot from them, especially some of those lovers. I was a painter and a writer as well.

I've just written Welcome to Mollywood. I'm pleased about that at this stage in my life.

It's kind of set me free this this latest memoir.

It seems curious to me as I sit here looking at that you say you're very much a product of the

...