David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades.
David Plante is the author of several novels, including his lauded Francoeur Trilogy, as well as several works of nonfiction, including The Pure Lover, Becoming a Londoner, and Worlds Apart. Scott Spencer has written eleven novels, including Endless Love, Walking the Dead, and the forthcoming The River Under the Road.
“Difficult Women is creepy, it is cruel, it is morally indefensible
— and it is exhilarating….There may be no defending these heartless
portrayals, but there’s also no denying their power. Each scene is
expertly staged, and burns with the same dark excitement you find
in Mary Gaitskill’s fiction or Harold Pinter’s plays, the feeling
that these characters have sought one another out to exercise
hidden fears and desires, to expose primal wounds. " —Parul Sehgal,
The New York Times
“A delicious sequence of character sketches, interrupted by the
occasional self-interrogatory aside....the book succeeds because
the women are so horribly alive.” —Christine Smallwood,
Harper’s
“Like its three subjects, Difficult Women is consistently
interesting. It’s as if Mr. Plante were staring out over a wild and
rugged topography of femaleness and wondering how one lives in such
a land. It’s a good question and a good book.” —Anatole Broyard,
The New York Times
“The memoir of Jean Rhys . . . is a remarkable achievement. . . .
Plante never forgot who Jean Rhys really was and what made her
valuable, so that while he captures neatly the shabby dishevelment
of the narcissistic girlwoman fallen into confused old age, he also
achieves full recognition for the writer whose eloquence and
maturity are endlessly redeeming. . . . [Plante] brings these
extremely interesting women to brilliant, mythic life.” —Vivian
Gornick
"[Plante’s] best book to date is Difficult Women, an unflattering
account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine
Greer. He...tells it pretty much like it was—and like he was, you
imagine." —London Review of Books
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