Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet. Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband. The trilogy is drawn from Ditlevsen's own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction. Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, while writing about female experience and identity.
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