Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years [Hardcover]

Diane DiPrima (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 19, 2001

An evocative, gritty memoir by the leading woman writer of the Beat Generation.

In this rich and passionate memoir, influential poet Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Only by heroic effort was she able to break away from her intense Brooklyn Italian family to follow through on the lifelong commitment to poetry she made in high school. Immersed in the proto-Beat world of Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, she emerged as a major force, not only establishing herself as a poet, but also coediting the influential literary newsletter, The Floating Bear, and cofounding The Poet's Theatre.

Recollections of My Life as a Woman chronicles the intense, creative cauldron of those years as the Beat movement emerged on both coasts, and the country accelerated into the sixties. Poetry, painting, dance, and theater flowed into one another, and well-known figures from all those worlds-including Merce Cunningham, Frank O'Hara, Audre Lorde, Trisha Brown, and Franz Kline-move through her story. Di Prima was a deliberate single parent at a time when that was unheard of, and her relationships and sexuality were as revolutionary as her writing. This is a powerful and unique remembering of how one woman's life revealed itself to her.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Di Prima, perhaps the best known and certainly among the most talented of the beat generation poets, captures the heady atmosphere of New York's avant-garde community in the 1950s and 1960s, while rendering her own life with intimacy and grace. Born in Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, she remembers her Italian immigrant grandmother with great affection. But she describes frightening incidents from her earliest childhood: her father, a sullen, brooding, man, once beat her until her nose bled; her relationship with her mother was equally abusive. In elementary school, di Prima was bullied relentlessly; it was not until she entered Hunter High School for gifted students that she found a circle of friends; there, reading the great poets, she resolved to become a poet herself. Leaving Swarthmore College after what she perceived as unproductive years, di Prima returned to New York City, and embarked on an independent life as a writer. She describes her bohemian lifestyle love affairs with men and women, experiments with drugs with honesty and wit. Friend to many of the best known figures of the beat world, including Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde and LeRoi Jones, di Prima found fulfillment in her work as an editor and poet, and as a single mother. She tells her story well, skillfully interweaving events with lyrical commentary on her inner life.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Poet di Prima chronicled her reign as queen of the Beats in her famously explicit Memoirs of a Beatnik (1968). Here she presents an equally frank self-portrait but on a far grander scale, delving so deeply into her past she transcends the personal to illuminate the primal cultural and psychological issues of the fifties and sixties. She was born in New York in 1934 and survived a brutal home life. Precocious and already committed to the writing life as a teenager, she dropped out of college to live a bohemian life in which lovers of both sexes and artist friends of all kinds came and went in a great swirl of Eros and creativity. Experience was valued above security, art was sacrosanct, and women writers were expected to behave like men. But di Prima wanted a child. Her recounting of the dramatic events of her life are riveting in themselves--whether the topic is her struggle as a single mother and woman writer; or the pain and passion of her affair with Leroi Jones, father of one of her five children; or the difficulties of her marriage to a gay man--but, finally, it's di Prima's electrifying perceptions into the nature of sex and love, men and women, art and beauty, drugs and spirituality, and freedom and commitment that keep readers glued to the page. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (April 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670851663
• ISBN-13: 978-0670851669
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #716,358 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Extra-Ordinary Life, May 23, 2001

By 

Ms Boyer (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Hardcover)

Diane di Prima has led an extraordinary life. A rebel from an upwardly-mobile immigrant family, pioneering beat writer, single mother, friend to artists of all stripes, explorer of consciousness, and classical scholar, her story takes the reader through the many worlds of New York City from the 30s to the 60s. At the same time she explores the inner worlds of memory, dream, and vision -- reveals how the soul's struggle for its own liberation is intimately related to the struggle for freedom in society. di Prima uses language with a poet's freedom, weaving her memoir from straight narrative, reflective essay, family stories, inside jokes, journal entries, letters, Buddhist cosmology, and western occultism. di Prima struggled through the abuse of her family and broke the rules of society to create a life on her own terms; as an artist, a woman, and a mother. What a gift this book is.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Thing!, December 15, 2002

By 

FullMind "denbee" (Yonkers, New York United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book, presenting a brilliant vibrant picture of a cultural movement and time, the Beats/Hippies, and a woman who embodied all the artistic and humanistic values in an incredibly pure form. To me, the book (and the woman) are inspiring in their dedication to the values of art, spontanaeity, love, and Zen naturalness. An invaluable read for women artists, especially, and also for artists in general, and people interested in a certain world view and life style.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars More divine Di Prima, February 24, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years (Hardcover)

Di Prima is not really meant to be a novelist -- and that's the beauty of this volume. Whereas the backbone of "poetic" writers such as Anne Rice is brutally literary, Di Prima captures all of that grandeur without so much embellishment. It's her poetry all over again: gritty, surreal, heartbreaking, fluid, and ever returning to her theme of what it means to be a woman and how she sought to find that meaning. This is especially gripping in terms of being a bisexual street poet (and later a single mother) in 1950s America. In an era when "gray was the colour and vanilla the flavour" -- when any deviation in hemline or hair length labeled you a communist, her differences were painful. Even the New York beats had a male chauvanist hierarchy that considered themselves far too good for Diane's realism, street language, slang. It seems that every life lesson we have to learn is somehow couched in this book, even through experiences one would hope to never endure.