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Title: Letters to a Friend

Author: Diana Athill, Edward Field

Narrator: Jennifer Dixon

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-28-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Artists, Writers, & Musicians

Publisher's Summary:

This epistolary memoir - rich with Diana Athill's characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty - describes a warm, decades-long friendship.

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 best seller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For 30 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 Athills 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.

Members Reviews:

And the friend in question is the American poet Edward Field

I first became a fan of Diana Athill via her 2000 memoir "Stet: An Editor's Life," about her 50 years at Britain's Andre Deutch publishing house where she edited Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Phillip Roth, V. S. Naipul and Jean Rhys, among others. I enjoyed even more her candid, up-close-and-personal 2008 memoir of old age, "Somewhere Towards the End." Then recently via Google I discovered the BBC's 45-minute interview with her in 2004 on Desert Island Discs.

I heartily recommend all of the above.

Now comes "Letters to a Friend," a collection of Athill's 1981-2007 letters to the American poet Edward Field, which I understand is getting great acclaim in Britain. It's interesting--I don't think Athill is capable of writing anything uninteresting--but not as interesting as the others. At least not to me. Maybe that's because in this one she's not talking to me, but to someone I not only don't know, but don't know much about. From her references here to Field's life and works, I think that's an omission on my part that needs fixing ASAP. For others like me who are not familiar with Field's poetry, Amazon has quite a collection, including two books of "collected works."

The fine art of friendship and correspondence

What a wonderful book. It is a collection of British editor Diana Athill's letters to her dear friend Edward Field, an American poet. Reading them, I almost felt as if I was sharing her life, and the lives of her friends. She is fierce, intelligent, funny and irreverent. She writes about their literary efforts, both successful and not, her friends, her travels, her Jamaican mate, Barry with whom she has shared a home for years, and the inevitable struggles with money and aging.