Letters to a Friend - Hardcover

Athill, Diana

3.86

145 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393062953 ISBN 13: 9780393062953

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

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This epistolary memoir―rich with Diana Athill's characteristic wit, humor, elegance and honesty―describes a warm, decades-long friendship.

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.

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About the Author:

After a distinguished career as a book editor, Diana Athill (1917―2019) won the National Book Critics Circle and Costa Biography Awards for her New York Times best-selling memoir Somewhere Towards the End. In January 2009, she was presented with an Order of the British Empire.

Review:

“Diana Athill is perhaps best known for her memoir Somewhere Towards the End, but Letters to a Friend could eclipse it. ... Each letter is an unalloyed delight; articulate to the point of eloquence, and candid, even about the naughty bits and her frustration with her long-time lover, Barry Reckord (a Jamaican playwright now deceased). They were together for years, in a relationship so open that, at one point, Athill invited one of his girlfriends to live with them. ...[E]very letter in Letters to a Friend is a small masterpiece; chatty, companionable and very, very intelligent.”
- Valerie Ryan, Shelf Awareness

“[T]his latest of her books,... demonstrates, through the tart comments she has interposed, that, well into her 90s, she has lost none of her fire. ...Her undeniably patrician manner and lapidary prose style notwithstanding, it is very clear from the warmth of Athill's communications with her friend that for her, kind hearts are indeed far more than coronets, her genuine concern and sympathy with his travails shining through.... One feels that Athill isn't capable of writing a rote ‘bread and butter letter.’ One of the joys of this book is how heartfelt her sentences always are, so full of freshness and purpose, whether describing an experience or indulging in a spot of delicious gossip. ... Words across an ocean from a true friend for all seasons.”
- Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle

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