Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three
David Plante
New York Review of Books Classics, 2017, £10.99
Worlds Apart: A Memoir
David Plante
Bloomsbury, 2016, £10.99
Becoming a Londoner: A Diary
David Plante
Bloomsbury, 2014, £9.99
The novelist David Plante has been keeping a diary of his life since 1959. Now running to many millions of words, it covers several decades of literary and artistic life in London and Europe, and is archived every few years in the New York Public Library. His first foray into its publication came early, too early, with Difficult Women in 1983. Now, following closely after Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart, two substantial volumes covering the 70s and 80s, Difficult Women has been republished as a New York Review of Books Classic.
Difficult Women relates, elegantly, wittily, and without mercy, Plante’s relationship with a near-senile Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, the entertaining and depressed widow of George (and inspiration for Julia, the protagonist of 1984), and the young Germaine Greer in her prime: articulate, ineducable, and irresistible.
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If it were a film, Difficult Women would be made up solely of tracking shots and close-ups, two gestures of observation that the French film maker Jean-Luc Godard described as ‘questions of morality’.
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