Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

A beautifully written, devastating memoir. Ditlevsen put my heart through the wringer.

I basically put my life on hold while reading this.

Childhood

Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen grew up in urban poverty in Copenhagen during the Great Depression. She doesn’t have a toothbrush. She gets rickets. She catches diptheria. The whole family sleep in a single bedroom. She aspires to hang out with the cool kids by the trash cans. But she also has a secret: she loves poetry.

Her family laugh at her dreams of being a poet. Women can’t be poets. Miffed, she vows never to share her ambitions again, and takes pains to hide her writing - even keeping her poetry book hidden in her knickers. Her mother warns her that reading will make her strange. Tove hides her intelligence, curiosity, and vocabulary behind a mask of stupidity. When she’s confronted, she bugs her eyes and slackens her jaw.

Despite the poverty and lure of petty crime, Tove has a strong moral compass. She’s a chaste teenager, even as the neighbourhood girls hook up and fall pregnant. The inevitable loss of her innocence is a source of tension in the first part of the trilogy. Childhood is captivating.

Youth

Unable to afford high school, Tove joins the labour market. Daily shifts of twelve-hour drudgery kill her inspiration to write. She has no energy for the library. She leaves home, and takes a room with a ghastly pro-Hitler landlady. War looms. But despite the dark times, Tove’s first poems are published.

Dependency

Despite her new marriage, Tove yearns for romance and love. Instead, she meets Carl, the atom bomb of her life. Her destruction is a harrowing, heart-breaking read - and we know from the start that this is a life with no happy ending. My heart was in my mouth during the last devastating chapter.

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