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Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
Diane di Prima
The major memoir of the one woman at the center of the Beat generation. Diane di Prima broke from a conservative Brooklyn Italian-American family to become a poet, and this book recounts the first three decades of that life — the hard childhood, the plunge into 1950s Manhattan bohemia, and her emergence as a poet, editor, and single mother at a time when that combination was almost unthinkable. She writes with candor and sensual precision about a world of Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Charlie Parker, and Audre Lorde, and about the particular cost of being a free woman inside a famously male movement. It is a vivid, essential corrective to the boys'-club version of Beat history.
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The author
Diane di Prima (1934–2020) was a poet, editor, and central figure of the Beat and later San Francisco countercultures — co-editor (with LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka) of the mimeographed newsletter The Floating Bear, author of Revolutionary Letters and the notorious Memoirs of a Beatnik, and later a student of Zen. She was, for decades, the most important woman writer to emerge from the Beat world.
The book
Published by Viking in 2001, a memoir of some four hundred pages covering her first three decades — Brooklyn childhood, her decision to become a poet, and immersion in the downtown New York bohemia of the 1950s. Its cast is a who's-who of the era (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Kenneth Rexroth, Charlie Parker, Merce Cunningham, Audre Lorde), but its real subject is a woman making an artist's life on her own terms.
How it reads
As candid, sensuous, and clear-eyed — both a chronicle of a legendary scene and a pointed account of what that scene asked of its women. It stands as one of the indispensable Beat memoirs and a feminist document besides.
For more context
Di Prima's own Revolutionary Letters and Memoirs of a Beatnik; and, for the milieu, the letters and memoirs of her contemporaries.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Diane di Prima
- Publisher
- Viking
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2001
- ISBN
- 0-670-85166-3
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine