Instead of a Letter

by Diana Athill, Lena Dunham (Afterword)

Overview

A riveting memoir about betrayed love, loss, and finding redemption and purpose in creative work.

Diana Athill’s childhood in the Norfolk countryside was idyllic. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They became engaged and traveled to Oxford. Then everything fell apart in the cruelest possible way.

In this classic modern memoir, Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains a story of hope, written with the frank intelligence and lack of self-pity that have become the hallmarks of her writing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681376134
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	343,121
Product dimensions:	5.02(w) x 7.97(h) x 0.68(d)

About the Author

Diana Athill (1917–2019) helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Her distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her memoir Stet. She is the author of seven further volumes of memoirs—Instead of a Letter; After a Funeral; Yesterday Morning; Make Believe; Somewhere Towards the End; Alive, Alive Oh!; A Florence Diary—and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book. Her only novel, Don’t Look at Me Like That, was first published in 1967. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End and was presented with an Order of the British Empire.

Editorial Reviews

Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions, Athill’s literary voice has all the courageous intelligence one associates with a certain type of British writer but none of the chill. This [is] the author’s scrupulous reckoning of her own single and childless existence . . .her work in publishing and the thrilling discovery that she, too, could write.” —The New Yorker

“Athill doesn’t write as if no one is watching; she writes as if she’d never even imagined someone might watch, and therefore doesn’t have a scruple to hold on to... she doesn’t pass off heartbreak as a blessing in disguise, or her subsequent successful career as a silver lining. Her abandonment was more like a signpost, something that pointed her to a brambly but invigorating path.” —Hillary Kelly, The New Yorker


"Athill writes elegantly about the shabby gentility of her childhood and her later career as a literary editor, but the drama here is in her frankness about the struggle to rebuild a personality taken apart by sadness.” —Susie Steiner, The Guardian

“The reader sees the transformation of the battered soul into a buoyant woman, open-minded and open-hearted.” —Hilary Mantel, Spectator

“Perhaps Athill’s greatest legacy was her refusal to cede to societal expectations as she carved out a persistently unusual world for herself in which the demands of femininity—marriage and children, specifically—were rethought and redefined.” —Lena Dunham, The New York Times

From the Publisher

"A brilliantly evocative autobiography."

Angus Wilson

"[T]his book, one of two earlier memoirs that have now been reissued, shows that her talent has been evident for decades. Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions, her literary voice has all the courageous intelligence one associates with a certain type of British writer but none of the chill."

The New Yorker