If you’re the sort of Queen fan who took a dim view of Mary Austin selling Freddie Mercury’s personal possessions at auction (as she did at Sotheby’s in 2023), then her first book will be like a red rag to a bull. And it wasn’t just fans who disapproved of Austin’s decision to move on artefacts and personal writings she was bequeathed by Mercury when he died in 1991: even Brian May pushed back, writing about his disappointment that the items were “to be knocked down to the highest bidder and dispersed for ever… I can’t look. To us, his closest friends and family, it’s too sad.”
Although if Austin – famously Mercury’s ex-fiancée and lifelong confidante, whom he once called “the only real friend I have” – doesn’t count as closest friends and family, then it’s hard to imagine who does. You don’t leave half of a £37.5m estate – including your Garden Lodge mansion – and 50 per cent of your future Queen royalties to a casual acquaintance.
So what to make of A Life in Lyrics by Freddie Mercury with Mary Austin, a book that annotates Mercury’s unseen personal archives and handwritten lyrics with stories about their relationship and Mercury’s creative journey? Austin has maintained a safely guarded privacy since Mercury died, which makes the publication of the book noteworthy in itself. And it seems Austin is well aware that among some fans of Queen, she is a divisive figure, both for the auction and for her supposed frosty relationship with Mercury’s long-term partner Jim Hutton: in Mercury’s will, he left just £500,000 to Hutton; Austin asked him to leave Garden Lodge with what critics say was indecent haste. As such, in the introduction to the book, Austin makes the case that sharing its contents is what Mercury would have wanted.
