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heyheybooks's review
5.0
It was fascinating reading about the life of Daphne Du Maurier. I’ve only read Rebecca, but it’s one of my top 3 favorite books, and I’ve read it twice. Now I want to read absolutely everything she’s written, as you may have gathered from my recent TBR additions. I didn’t know a whole lot about her life, other than the basics of her love for the Menabilly house, which inspired Rebecca. There were connections I wasn’t aware of, like being cousins with the boys who inspired Peter Pan, her husband being the treasurer for the Duke of Edinburgh, and having royal visits from Phillip and Elizabeth, once each. Daphne is a very different person and had a very different lifestyle than me, but I still feel a connection to her, for her love of old houses and physical locations. She died the day after I was born, and depending on time zones and the precise hour at which she died (in her sleep, overnight, in England), may have actually died the day I was born in the Pacific Northwest of the US.
As for the biography itself, it’s written with a narrative voice rather than typical nonfiction bio. This style bothered me when Daphne was a small girl aged 4-10 but then worked better as she grew older. It bothered me again during the death scene, when Daphne, succumbed to a pervasive mental fog in the last phase of her life, and having gone to bed one night, suddenly sees her life and works flash before her and remembers her whole life. There is no way to know if this actually happened and it felt like the author was trying to make more meaning and a better book ending, out of the death of an author who was barely herself at the end of her life, and couldn’t remember her own books.
As for the biography itself, it’s written with a narrative voice rather than typical nonfiction bio. This style bothered me when Daphne was a small girl aged 4-10 but then worked better as she grew older. It bothered me again during the death scene, when Daphne, succumbed to a pervasive mental fog in the last phase of her life, and having gone to bed one night, suddenly sees her life and works flash before her and remembers her whole life. There is no way to know if this actually happened and it felt like the author was trying to make more meaning and a better book ending, out of the death of an author who was barely herself at the end of her life, and couldn’t remember her own books.
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