Little known in the U.S., the writer Tove Ditlevsen (1917–1976) is widely beloved in her native Denmark. She wrote dozens of books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but her crowning literary achievement is the Copenhagen Trilogy, a trio of frank, riveting memoirs published stateside by Farrar, Straus and Giroux earlier this week. An excerpt from the third volume, Dependency, newly translated from the Danish by Michael Favala Goldman, appears below.

Tove Ditlevsen. Photo courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Everything in the living room is green—the carpet, the walls, the curtains—and I am always inside it, like in a picture. I wake up every morning around five o’clock and sit down on the edge of the bed to write, curling my toes because of the cold. It’s the middle of May, and the heating is off. I sleep by myself in the living room, because Viggo F. has lived alone for so many years that he can’t get used to suddenly sleeping with another person. I understand, and it’s fine with me, because now I have these early morning hours all to myself. I’m writing my first novel, and Viggo F. doesn’t know. Somehow I think that if he knew, he would correct it and give me advice, like he does all the other young people who write in Wild Wheat, and then that would block the flow of sentences coursing through my brain all day long. I write by hand on cheap yellow vellum, because if I used his noisy typewriter, which is so old it belongs in the National Museum, it would wake him up. He sleeps in the bedroom looking out on the courtyard, and I don’t wake him until eight o’clock. Then he gets up in his white nightshirt with the red trim, and with an annoyed look on his face, he walks out to the bathroom. Meanwhile I make coffee for both of us and butter four pieces of bread. I put a lot of butter on two of them, because he loves anything fattening. I do whatever I can to please him, because I’m so thankful he married me. Although I know something still isn’t quite right, I carefully avoid thinking about that. For some incomprehensible reason, Viggo F. has never taken me in his arms, and that does bother me a little, as if I had a stone in my shoe. It bothers me a little because I think there must be something wrong with me, and that in some way I haven’t lived up to his expectations. When we sit across from each other, drinking coffee, he reads the newspaper, and I’m not allowed to talk to him. That’s when my courage drains away like sand in an hourglass; I don’t know why. I stare at his double chin, vibrating weakly, spilling out over the edge of his wing-tip collar. I stare at his small, dainty hands, moving in short, nervous jerks, and at his thick, gray hair which resembles a wig, because his ruddy, wrinkle-free face would better suit a bald man. When we finally do talk to each other, it’s about small, meaningless things—what he wants for dinner, or how we should fix the tear in the blackout curtains. I feel glad if he finds something cheerful in the newspaper, like the day when it said people could buy alcohol again, after the occupying forces had forbidden that for a week. I feel glad when he smiles at me with his single tooth, pats my hand, says goodbye, and leaves. He doesn’t want false teeth, because he says that in his family men die at fifty-six, and that’s only three years away, so he doesn’t want the expense. There’s no hiding the fact that he’s stingy, and that doesn’t really match the high value my mother put on being able to provide. He’s never given me a piece of clothing, and when we go out in the evening to visit some famous person, he takes the streetcar, while I have to ride my bicycle alongside it, speeding along so I can wave to him when he wants. I have to keep a household budget, and when he looks at it, he always thinks everything is too expensive. When I can’t get it to add up, I write “miscellaneous,” but he always makes a fuss about that, so I try not to miss any expenses. He also makes a fuss about having a housekeeper in the mornings, since I’m home anyway, doing nothing. But I can’t and won’t keep house, so he has no choice. I feel glad when I see him cut across the green lawn toward the streetcar, which stops right in front of the police station. I wave to him, and when I turn away from the window, I completely forget about him until he shows up again. I take a shower, look in the mirror, and think to myself that I am only twenty years old, and that it feels like I have been married for a generation. It feels like life beyond these green rooms is rushing by for other people as if to the sound of kettledrums and tom-toms. Meanwhile I am only twenty years old, and the days descend on me unnoticeably like dust, each one just like the rest. Read More

Photo: © JRP Studio / Adobe Stock.

There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

—Matthew 8:12

I woke up with dried blood on my lips. This was the first sign that something was wrong. It was March, the month that everything was wrong. Outside my kitchen window the sky was gray, still cold, Brooklyn-bleak. I had just left my marriage, and at nights I drank wine in bed and listened to podcasts so that I wouldn’t have to sit with my thoughts. I hadn’t noticed anything strange when I got out of bed, not even the slight taste of iron in my mouth. It came together when I caught sight of myself in the bathroom mirror while the coffee boiled on the stove. My lips and every tooth in my mouth were caked in a gluey, rust-brown film of blood. There was no cut on my lip. My gums were healthy. But I had neck pain and back pain and shoulder pain, a tension headache, a lump on my lip. I had been grinding my teeth, and I had ground so hard that I’d made myself bleed.

The next day we were all fired. The bookstore where I’d worked for six years had been told to shut, as had all nonessential businesses in New York City. The writers festival for which I was due to travel back to Australia was canceled. From bed I did an interview with a journalist in London about climate change in contemporary literature and tried to stay calm. The grocery store was out of nearly everything, the subway was empty, no masks or hand sanitizer were to be found. The call came out from the mayor’s office. Shelter in place.

“Shelter in place.” But I wasn’t sure where my “place” was meant to be. I was already in a state of transition and flux. I had a flight booked to Sydney. I took it. That week ushered in the two constants of my life this past year: displacement, teeth grinding. Read More

Photo: © Abi Olayiwola / Adobe Stock.

Let me show you my home. It is the subterranean water body of my mother. I drift in her voice and amniotic fluid. When she steps into the light, I am in the light. When her sun sets, my sun sets. As she moves, I move. I somersault, dive, kick, poke, remind her I am inside her, becoming. Through our placenta, I taste her blood, mingled with Aleppo pepper and mint.

Let me show you my home. It is a city on the Indian Ocean. The fishermen drag their dhows onto white sand at dawn to unload the night’s tilapia, squid, and snapper. At dusk, they disappear back into the blue.

Under the shade of a thatched umbrella, I slurp from a straw in a coconut while my father plays soccer with the boys who sell them. We have been here all day, blackening. Tomorrow monsoon season might start, later than in years past. But tonight, live music at Oyster Bay. Women and palm trees will sway and rustle. For me, mishkaki—skewered chicken and goat with chili and lime. For my father, nyama choma and beer. On the drive home, we will ride in the back of a pickup. We will pass the Aga Khan mosque and the Lutheran church. The smell of bougainvillea and jacaranda trees will come rushing at us on the wind.

Let me show you my home. It is my father’s embrace. Strong biceps press into my rib cage, firm hands on my back. My feet are lifted off the floor. I fly, without fear, over my father’s head. I know he will hold me up until I land in sheets. “See you in the morning,” he says, and I have no reason, yet, not to believe him. Read More

In 1974, Bette Howland (1937–2017) published her first book, W-3, which details her stint in a Chicago psychiatric ward. In the ensuing decade, Howland would release two more books and receive a MacArthur Fellowship. Soon, however, like many brilliant women of her era, she fell out of print. Thanks to the efforts of A Public Space Books, Howland’s work has resurfaced for contemporary readers; 2019 saw the publication of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: The Selected Stories of Bette Howland, and this week marks the reissue of W-3. An excerpt from W-3 appears below.

Bette Howland. Photo courtesy of A Public Space Books.

Iris had posted herself in the lounge with her cigarettes, emery boards, and stationery, writing letters on a silk-trousered knee. One hand fanned and fluttered the while, drying her nail polish. She was new to W-3; arrestingly tall, white faced, with frosted gray bangs and a black Nehru jacket buttoned to her chin. But her eyes were smeared; her pasted lashes sank like weights. In other words, like the rest of us, she seemed untidy. We were looking for such signs, of course: What’s wrong with her? Why is she here? “Here” being the small psychiatric ward of the sprawling university hospital.

On the windowsill there would be some withered, dusty plant, long dead, still wrapped in bows and silver foil from the florist’s: inmates received them rarely. Magazines accumulated all over the place, discarded heaps, old Times and Newsweeks mostly; no one read them. The cupboard was crammed—boxes of puzzles, games protruding from every angle. All those boxes would have tumbled down at once if anyone ever attempted to disturb them. No one ever did. Read More

In the summer of 2011, three months before her eightieth birthday, the playwright Adrienne Kennedy reflected on her life in the unpublished essay “Almost Eighty.” Now, nearly a decade later, with Kennedy’s ninetieth birthday right around the corner, the piece has finally been published in He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box and Other Plays, which Theatre Communications Group released in November. The essay appears in full below.

Adrienne Kennedy’s mother, Etta Hawkins (née Haugabook), 1928, while a student at Atlanta University. Photo courtesy of Adrienne Kennedy.

At almost eighty, I wondered if I could find reasons to live.

I kept begging my son to print out pages of my mother’s scrapbook, which was on his computer. Why?

All I knew was my eightieth birthday was in three months, and I was extremely sad. I had been at his family house in Virginia for a month, the month of June. For the first time I could not see how I was going to financially maintain my apartment in Manhattan, my beloved apartment on West Eighty-Ninth Street, an apartment I’d had for twenty-nine years, despite commuting to California and Boston, my precious home near the Hudson.

I seemed to lack energy, purpose. Dreams.

“Please print out mother’s scrapbook,” I begged. He was busy. The scrapbook was in the middle of other documents.

I didn’t know why but I kept begging. I wanted to see that scrapbook, started in 1926. I wanted to see all the glued-on photographs and programs that filled the pages until 1928. And from 1928 to 1954 all the photographs and newspaper articles that were stuck inside the pages of the scrapbook.

I’d already decided if I can’t find reasons to live, then what’s the point?

What can I embark on at eighty?

What could I possibly embark on?

“Embarking” had always been one of my mental mainstays.

Finally, Adam printed out my mother’s scrapbook that she started when she was a student at Atlanta University, 1926–1928. I felt it was my compass. My beautiful compass. Read More

A series of small elevators takes me up the Gloria in Excelsis Tower of the National Cathedral, where balconies overlook the highest views in Washington, D.C. To one side is Sugarloaf Mountain; to the other is the Washington Monument. People kiss in the Bishop’s Garden below and I dangle my arms above them. I peer over the stone balcony while several women behind me ring the bells in patterns I don’t understand. They tell me there’s a six-month learning curve before I could play.

From the ceiling, ten ropes hang above a circular platform on which the ringers stand. The ceiling protects our hearing; above it are the bells. The rest of the ringing chamber is filled with odd end things—a chalkboard for writing out methods, a miniature model bell, novelty clocks, and a drawer filled with copies of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, a British novel that features stolen emeralds and the world of change ringing.

*

Change ringing is an intellectual sport. It involves a set of ringers, one per bell, taking turns to together perform a series of memorized patterns. The result isn’t melodic, like carillon bells, but something far more transfixing, like a pulsing code, the slow collapse of a bridge, marbles being dropped down the face of K2. Ringers mark weddings, funerals, federal holidays, and crises, or sometimes do what’s called a “peal attempt,” which involves ringing thousands of possible permutations on a set of bells, and can take hours without pause.

I heard about change ringing from a friend, whose parents met and fell in love at a tower in college. They’ve been ringing together for decades. The friend described change ringing as “religious adjacent”—historically, those who didn’t care for Sunday mass would ascend the tower to ring and drink. Contemporary ringers come from varying professions but often have backgrounds in math or music. Famous ringers include Sir John Betjeman, poet and defender of Victorian architecture; Jon Shanklin, discoverer of the hole in the ozone; Kate Barker, economist; John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress; Paul Revere, silversmith.

My curiosity in the bells was immediate and inextinguishable, as though I’d found a possible sound that could make up for all my silences. Read More