Difficult Women:

A Memoir of Three

by David Plante

NYRB Classics

$16.95 List Price

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It is obvious why David Plante’s “memoir” Difficult Women, about his “friendships” with three prominent figures in the 1970s, found a publisher the first time around. (More on the scare quotes shortly.) Back then, in 1983, two of his subjects—novelist Jean Rhys and literary executor/professional widow Sonia Orwell—were newly dead, and famous mostly within intellectual circles, giving the book insider appeal, while the third, the always larger-than-life writer and feminist Germaine Greer, who’s had the dubious luck of outlasting this book twice now, granted a dollop of commercial relevance. Or so one imagines a publisher calculating.

Why it’s been reissued now, by the editors of the NYRB Classics series, who reliably return worthy titles to our attention, is less evident.

Certainly it’s a curious book, an artifact not only of a time and place—1970s literary London, Italy, and, unexpectedly, Tulsa, Oklahoma—but also of the mean, sad predaceousness of the literary world in general, which drove Plante home each night to complain to his diary, then rewarded (punished?) him by making these private grievances public. Among people who live and die by the pen, gossip is gold.

Make no mistake, Plante is in on the game. He opens the book with a visit to Jean Rhys, and the ultimate name drop: “I asked at reception for Mrs. Hamer. It always gave me pleasure to use her married name, not the name she was known by.” Immediately, lest we confuse him with a sycophant, he boasts of his indifference: “She once told me some of the names she had used in her life to keep her life secret, and

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