Letters to a Friend
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“What a feast. Diana’s work compels me. . . . She’s got her teeth into life!”—Alice Munro
Diana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For thirty years, Athill corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely sharing jokes, pleasures, and pains with her old friend. Letters to a Friend is an epistolary memoir that describes a warm, decades-long friendship. Written with intimacy and spontaneity, candor and grace, it is perhaps more revealing than any of her celebrated books.
Edited, selected, and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own delightful notes, this collection—rich with Athill’s characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty—reveals a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase, and a wicked sense of humor. Covering her career as an editor, the adventure of her retirement, her immersion in her own writing, and her reactions to becoming unexpectedly famous in her old age—including gossip about legendary authors and mutual friends, sharp pen-portraits, and uninhibited accounts of her relationships—Letters to a Friend describes a flourishing friendship and offers a portrait of a woman growing older without ever losing her zest for life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Only one side of the 30-year correspondence between longtime British author Athill, an editorial director at Andre Deutsch, and the American poet Edward Field is conveyed here, while the absence of Field's replies are not adequately explained. The two began swapping letters between London and New York City in 1980, inspired by their mutual friendship with the difficult, somewhat mad Andre Deutsch author Alfred Chester (The Exquisite Corpse), who had died in 1971; Field was inquiring how to bring Chester out of "literary annihilation." Over the course of the decades, Athill reveals a growing familiarly, fondness, and admiration for Field ("Darling Edward") and for his longtime blind partner, Neil Derrick, who together visited her occasionally in London. Athill's letters reveal literary gossip about her authors; enthusiasm for writing projects; home improvement works; travels with her cousin, Barbara; and a deeply ambivalent, changing relationship with Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord. Much of the correspondence devolves into details of the "creeping and wheezing" of getting old (Athill is now in her 90s, and Field is six years younger). Throughout this warm, enduring literary bond, Athill exposes a charming wit, vanity, and graciousness.