Reviews with content warning for Addiction - The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency

It was beautiful being led through Ditlevson's life, to taste her breath, the air around and take in an upbringing.
I am left somber and grateful by the end of the trilogy.
Always in reverence of a life lived.

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georgiarybanks's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

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liannaedgelord's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

miserable book about a miserable woman being miserable. really made me miss drugs. loved it, would def recommend.

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odpeppiatt's review

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dark emotional reflective sad tense fast-paced

3.5

“I can see Morten’s angular honest face before me, and I remember his poem: I have known death since I was a boy. It’s so strange, I say, how he wrote so much about death. I know, says Tutti, calming down a little. It’s as if he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to live.”

In the same vein (no pun intended), it’s as if Tove Ditlevsen wrote so much about this far-fetched glimmer of freedom throughout each era of her life because she knew when she finally grabbed hold of it, it would disintegrate through her fingers. Throughout her childhood and youth, she dreams of being a writer (“I always dreamed of finding a person, just one, to whom I could show my poems and who would praise them.”), finding true love (“But I’ve begun to long for the intimate closeness with another human being that is called love. I long for love without knowing what it is. I think that I’ll find it when I no longer live at home. And the man I love will be different from anyone else.”), and having a generally conventional life (“Ebbe asks, Why do you want to be normal and regular? Everyone knows you’re not. I don’t know how to answer him, but I have wanted that as far back as I can remember.”). In every stage of her life, she sets her desperate hope of happiness on the future, while being consciously miserable and romanticizing her past. In the first installment of the trilogy, Childhood, she writes, “Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own. It’s there all the time and everyone can see it just as clearly as you can see Pretty Ludvig’s harelip,” only to reminisce on that time of her life in the second, Youth, saying, “most of the time I find this life intolerably boring and recall with sorrow my variable and eventful childhood.”

This Faustian cycle continues to repeat itself until she is met with the amalgamation of her greatest desires: she is a famous writer married to a man who loves her with a child they share— the epitome of conventional bliss. But this formula for bliss produced an opposite effect. Ditlevsen moved from marriage to marriage, ultimately drawing into herself and having to endure two shifty abortions because women’s healthcare was so scarce in this regard. She moved forward from both procedures without the fetuses, but the latter burdened her with a crippling addiction to narcotics. In the end, the only moments that offered her any semblance of freedom were distorted through the haze of Demerol, and even those were fleeting and accompanied excruciating consequences.

In this beautifully written, enthralling glimpse into the life of a young woman in Denmark during WWII, Ditlevsen exposes the evasiveness of freedom and the trouble with happiness (pun intended).

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relf's review

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

A collection of three memoirs describing the author's childhood--not happy, but already singularly aimed at becoming a writer; her early working years and sexual adventures; and her descent into addiction. Tove Ditlevsen's writing is bracingly clear and unsentimental, and the narration of her own story is compelling--I found it almost suspenseful. Highly recommended. I happened to listen to Billy Porter's memoir at the same time as I was reading this, and, different as the stories are, the parallels were interesting: both authors had difficult childhoods but were single-minded from a very early age on practicing their arts and achieving success, whatever it took.

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m_sotos's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional medium-paced

3.5

It is strange that in reading a memoir, I was left at the end with a very vague/incomplete sense of who the author and subject actually was. I read a review of the memoir that speaks about how Ditlevsen splits one person into two selves in the text: the self who writes and the one who exists in reality, and yet she’s unable to ever quite integrate those two selves. I think that’s a perfect summary of how reading this book feels. Despite being led through Ditlevsen’s reality from childhood to adulthood, I never really felt that I understood her own role in that reality. The brisk narration of big life events makes it seem as though she herself isn’t ever really experiencing anything to the fullest. Her life trajectory jumps from marriage to marriage quickly, just as it jumps around between various jobs, living situations, and friendships seemingly undifferentiatingly. Despite this, she’s clearly not a fully passive participant in her life (as we see also through the myriad of ways she takes charge of obtaining different drugs to uphold her opioid addiction). It’s a strange balance between Ditlevsen as the narrator controlling the presentation of her life retrospectively and seeming to pass through these same life events relatively unfeelingly as they happen. While I think the clipped, straightforward narration produces an interesting effect and (likely intentionally) speaks to the dulling impact of a perpetually unsatisfied existence, I ultimately prefer a bit more feeling for my own reading enjoyment!

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