Diana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor
of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated
memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New York Times
bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For thirty
years, Athill corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely
sharing jokes, pleasures, and pains with her old friend. Letters to a
Friend is an epistolary memoir that describes a warm, decades-long
friendship. Written with intimacy and spontaneity, candor and grace, it
is perhaps more revealing than any of her celebrated books.
Edited, selected, and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own
delightful notes, this collection--rich with Athill's characteristic
wit, humor, elegance, and honesty--reveals a sharply intelligent woman
with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase, and a wicked
sense of humor. Covering her career as an editor, the adventure of her
retirement, her immersion in her own writing, and her reactions to
becoming unexpectedly famous in her old age--including gossip about
legendary authors and mutual friends, sharp pen-portraits, and
uninhibited accounts of her relationships--Letters to a Friend
describes a flourishing friendship and offers a portrait of a woman
growing older without ever losing her zest for life.
