“Wonderful Tonight,” which Boyd wrote with Penny Junor, is a charming, lively and seductive book, and like all good memoirs, it also works as a cultural history. Boyd — who spent part of her childhood in Kenya, the child of divorced parents who never had much money — visited the Maharishi with the Beatles; she whirled and twirled in chiffon dresses created by her friend, the quintessential rock-royalty designer Ossie Clark; she pranced and partied with the Rolling Stones.

Image Pattie Boyd with Eric Clapton in 1983. Credit... Photograph by Associated Press

But she also took Harrison’s parents, two lovely working-class people from Liverpool, on a trip to Paris, to give them a taste of the luxury she thought they deserved. In “Wonderful Tonight,” Boyd seems like a real person who happened to be lucky enough to live shoulder to shoulder with rock deities. The prose is clear and unpretentious, and although she writes candidly about the pain her husbands’ infidelities caused her — particularly Harrison’s affair with Ringo Starr’s first wife, Maureen — this isn’t a bitter tell-all screed. There’s an aura of sweetness around Boyd’s approach. Her early years with Harrison, who comes off as a relatively gentle man, clearly were happy ones, and she rather openly states that she regrets leaving him — although she’s quick to acknowledge she would have regretted missing out on the passion she felt for Clapton. The Clapton chapters are the dreariest in the book, through no fault of Boyd’s: at the time they were married, Clapton suffered from a serious drinking problem, and he appears to be a total pill, which may be a harsh blow to those who still like to think of him as God. (Clapton’s own memoir has just been published, so perhaps God will have the last word after all.)

But if Boyd was largely unhappy in her years with Clapton, she’s generous toward him too. She tells the story of the song “Wonderful Tonight,” which he wrote as he was watching her take forever to dress for a night out: “It was such a simple song but so beautiful and for years it tore at me. To have inspired Eric, and George before him, to write such music was so flattering. Yet I came to believe that although something about me might have made them put pen to paper, it was really all about them.” Far from basking in the glow of adoration those songs represent — what woman wouldn’t be flattered to have inspired “Something,” which Frank Sinatra called the best love song ever written? — she instead sees them as admittedly beautiful works about a woman who doesn’t, and who can never, exist. Boyd talks about the “depressions” Harrison and Clapton suffered as the price of great creativity: even if they weren’t really seeing the woman in front of them, they were still the ones doing the work of making the songs.

That’s about as self-effacing as a muse can get. Would “Layla” or “Something” have been written if Boyd had never existed? Harrison and Clapton would have achieved greatness without her; they’d have hung their dreams on some other girl. But that doesn’t negate Boyd’s story, which is largely about the transformative powers of rock ’n’ roll. Think it can’t change your life? Ask that ethereal young schoolgirl sitting on a crate in the baggage car. When she let the music in, perhaps she opened herself to the possibility that it would take something from her, too.