Difficult Women by David Plante

Difficult Women by David Plante (1983) is a memoir about David Plante's experiences with Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer. I first read it when I was around 20 and reading everything by or related to Jean Rhys. It contains dialogue and many scenes. Each woman has their own section. The first section is about Jean Rhys. It has David Plante in Jean Rhys' hotel room where she lives I think and is in her 80's. David Plante interviews her I think for the Paris Review (the link has someone else's name because David Plante didn't finish it or something) and talks to her and assists her with her autobiography. It shows Jean Rhys drunk for most of it. At the end David Plante pees and leaves the toilet seat up and Jean Rhys goes to pee and falls in the toilet. I think there are some weak struggling noises before she asks for help. I think the last image is of Jean Rhys sitting on the bed in the hotel room with her dress wet with pee and toilet water.

The second part shows David Plante as a young, "aspiring" author (25, I think, with no books published) hanging out with Sonia Orwell (George Orwell's last wife who cared for Jean Rhys when Jean Rhys was old) who is around 40 I think. David Plante says Sonia Orwell is more depressed than Jean Rhys. The word "depressed" is used often, I liked whenever it was used, it seemed funny. I enjoy David Plante's tone, he is mostly detached in his interactions with the three women. He is sexually attracted to men only. He seems passive and funny and afraid sometimes. At one point Sonia Orwell while drunk talks continuous shit about David Plante (saying he can't write, criticizing his life) and David Plante says, in the book, that he just kept saying "yes" whenever a new unit of shit-talking was directed at him and that each time he said "yes" he became more depressed. Sonia Orwell is drunk for maybe 40-70% of her section. She talks at one point in a sarcastic tone about killing herself. Throughout the book David Plante questions his intentions and says maybe 5-10 times that he seems to be hanging out with these people for selfish reasons. Sonia Orwell dies of a brain tumor, I think.

In the third section Jean Rhys and Sonia Orwell are dead. David Plante hangs out with Germaine Greer (David Plante is a little famous at this point, Germaine Greer is very famous) and they drive around and go to Italy I think. Then they are in Oklahoma both teaching at a college. The dialogue in Difficult Women is sometimes very long. The scenes seem very detailed psychologically, like David Plante wrote down what he thought each day, or some days, in a diary or something. I sometimes felt myself "studying" people's facial expressions and movements and thinking about their possible emotions and thoughts. David Plante wrote it in a way that many things were ambiguous. Sometimes someone would make a facial expression or say something that did not seem logical, or seemed to be the effect of something not known to David Plante, and David Plante would not try to assimilate it (except speculatively) into a narrative, or into anything, but would describe it concretely. Sometimes if I have an intense night socially I will later rethink what happened during certain conversations, "viewing" it in slow motion in my head to detect previously unnoticed behaviors, and I had that feeling sometimes with this book.

I would like to read many more books like this, where someone who is currently not severely depressed writes scenes and dialogue of hanging out with various people, focusing mostly on the other people, who are famous and maybe preferably severely depressed. I like reading about famous people who are severely depressed, severely detached, extremely productive, severely unmotivated in life, or a combination of those. If a famous person in a book is severely depressed I feel that it is almost always funny to me, whereas if for example a Yates character is severely depressed it can sometimes feel like something else. I like reading scenes where people are drunk at a party, or just at any kind of party. I would like to read many more accounts of people hanging out with Jean Rhys.

At the end of the book is a glossary type thing. David Plante writes words like "money" or "music" and then writes each woman's views or thoughts about each word. Under "party" it says "Jean loves going to parties. She sits quietly in the centre and people lean towards her and talk. For periods no one speaks to her, and she stares out."