The Copenhagen Trilogy

Istedgade in the 1930s: a working-class Vesterbro street where a girl writes poems in secret and prays for a life beyond the laundry and the factory. Tove Ditlevsen's three memoirs — Childhood, Youth, Dependency — follow that girl into Copenhagen's literary circles, through four marriages, and into an addiction so precisely described it reads like a clinical manual written by its own subject. The prose is stripped bare, almost casual in its devastation. Ditlevsen wrote these in the 1960s and 70s; it took sixty years for English readers to find them. They arrived like a detonation.