Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years

by Diane di Prima

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school. Immersing herself in Manhattan's early 1950s Bohemia, di Prima quickly emerged as a renowned poet, an influential editor, and a single mother at a time when this was unheard of. Vividly chronicling the intense, creative cauldron of those years, she recounts her revolutionary relationships and sexuality, and how her experimentation led her to define herself as a woman. What emerges is a fascinating narrative about the courage and triumph of the imagination, and how one woman discovered her role in the world.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Poetry, Biography, Feminism, Autobiography, Biography Memoir

424 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2001

About the author

Diane di Prima was an American poet and member of the Beat Generation. She was San Francisco’s poet laureate from 2009 to 2011.

Reviews

[Minnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly brilliant . Di Prima’s illustrations of womanhood are timeless and tender and brutal

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an exhausting chronicle of an iconoclastic woman who has made a life in art. Diane di Prima, born in the thirties in New York, writes poetry and plays; directs and acts in avant garde theater productions; lives in "pad"; does drugs; has babies; cavorts with jazz musicians and has written it all down. This all began in the 1950's in New York. She was, what I think they used to call a "beatnik" and her depiction of the life is sort of what I imagined it would be when I wanted to be a "beatnik". The way she chose to live her life required unimaginable "guts" and I have to admire her tenacity to be who she wanted to be. I don't think I have ever read a better description of a "cold water flat" which was also my dream abode when I wanted to be a beatnik. Thank heavens I never lived in one, because the rats would have bothered me, plus the bathtub in the kitchen. I am too straight to have ever been comfortable in the chaos of that world. And, maybe because I am old now, I can't imagine living without knowing where the rent was coming from. It was a creative and free time though, and reading about having coffee at midnight in a bookstore, and wandering the New York streets with no real purpose in mind, sometimes high, fascinates my small-town perspective. It was all very untidy though, and the "crash pad" texture of most of her living arrangements make it hard for me to imagine how anyone ever got a thing done. Plus, her nonchalance about babysitters and being away from her kids at all hours and seemingly without many regrets, astounds me. But, di Prima did get things done and her world was a boiling cauldron of creativity. She knew dancers and theater people and writers, some of whom we have all heard of. RECOLLECTIONS... is 424 pages long and near the end, di Prima gives in to Buddhist meditations and spirituality. What some people would have turned into a debacle of a life di Prima has instead turned into a readable and energetic memoir. And, honestly, she is an inspiration and model for unfetterd WOMANHOOD!

[Amy Berkowitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have no idea who I’d be if I hadn’t read this as a teenager but I’d definitely be a different person.

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's difficult to enjoy a memoir when you can't get over your increasing dislike for the author (who you knew nothing about prior to reading - and sort of wish you still knew nothing about). I liked the bits with descriptions of projects and the intricacies of the Beat movement and living in New York in the early '60s. Unfortunately, to get these I had to struggle through passages full of improbable crystal clear 'memories' of being an adult in a three-year-old's body, not to mention paragraph after paragraph dedicated to recounting the author's uncontrollable urge to procreate... over, and over, and over, and over, and over again (one 'over' for each child). Then there's the whole 'marrying an abusive, mentally ill (gay) man I hate just because' thing. I'm not exactly sure how any of this qualifies di Prima as an inspirational feminist to be looked up to. Is it because she was the only female writer there that she automatically gets that utterly undeserved epithet?

[Sceox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they 'actually' were, and there is always a price to pay for them. They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred. The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called 'real world.' Or we are somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live. Sometimes with deadly rapidity.

"This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going. Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful. Vivid, bright, and deadly, like some tropical flowers. Not human. Not cut to our measure.

"But we--we couldn't see that. Thought we were gods..."

[Jiva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will carry what I've read in this book with me forever.

[manasa k · Rating 5 out of 5]

diane di prima’s poetry and thoughts on creativity/friendship/culture always ring very true to me. its taken me a while to get around to this memoir mostly because it seems like there are never! any copies available anywhere. paris delivered. reading this was like getting important life advice through stories from a cool older woman who you idolize just a little bit. extremely incisive and honest, especially when she is writing about motherhood. filing under things to read again when im like 30

[Brooke Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I've gone through life thus far, I've found the people I'm attracted to not linked often by physical attributes or interests, but rather a steadfast sense of self. A knowledge of their place in the world and a commitment to that feeling. Maybe in the past it has been because of my lack of this knowledge, or my propensity to be an observer and thus an 'absorber' rather than one who shouts from the rooftops. But I've always found it a beautiful thing, and found these people extremely lucky, to, at least externally, seem to so diligently know what they want to commit their lives to. At times it's a partner, a romance or a friendship. Other times it is a career, artwork, advocacy, whatever it may be. All iterations are beautiful. And at times perhaps this over-emphasized knowledge of self is not so sympathetic a trait in men, though that is only to my detriment in this personal situation as I'm left to figure out where I fit into all that ego. In saying this, I mean to applaud Di Prima -- though she'd likely scoff at the notion. In this memoir and the other work that I've seen of her, I so ardently admire what she calls her commitment to art, but what I think more often manifests as her commitment to self. As women we are so often pushed to bury our traits in the things around us, to cover our interests and our voices and whatever else may take up space. These opinions were only further emphasized in Di Prima's world as an artist, as one living in poverty, as one that rejected traditional means of beauty. And despite it all, she did what she wanted to do because she wanted to do it. Because those decisions felt divine and holy and no amount of human doubt or self consciousness could stop those actions from being made. She epitomizes the things I've struggled with most in my life as one who too often is overcome with fear, thus stopping myself from reaching out and just grabbing those things. In terms that seem more fitting, "grabbin life by the balls!"

I haven't sat down and read in a while, and I'm just so glad to have encountered this book, and through it found so many pieces of beatnik art to further explore. Di Prima almost solely carved a space for herself as a woman in Beatnik literature and seemingly beyond, and god forgive me for pitting beatnik woman against beatnik woman but...reading Di Prima does make you question a little bit on why Patti Smith's 'Just Kids' is so culturally relevant and her stuff is hidden between the shadows a little more. Granted I've only read that one book by Smith and I'm understanding as Robert Mapplethorpe as the subject. And maybe as humans we're just suckers for a love story. But to me this memoir was very reminiscent of that; scrounging around New York, dedicating yourself to work and community. But focused on self in a very healthy way -- and as a woman reading, so often immersed in the male-driven history of this literary movement, it's almost cathartic to hear of this amazing woman propelling history and lowkey showing up geniuses like Ginsberg and Kerouac with her commitment to self and refusal to budge. Anyway I hope this makes sense because I'm not reading it through but Diane I love you and I'll say it! You're the coolest of the Beatnik poets.

[Benjamin Fasching-Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back when I was reading all the big name boy Beats, people smarter and more well-read than me told me to read Diane di Prima and now some thirty years later I have. So I kind of feel like this book found me, because it was a bit further down on the "to read" list when I stumbled on it in Vienna's feminist bookstore ChickLit.

Di Prima grew up in a working class Italian family in Brooklyn surrounded by the stereotypical domestic violence but there are some rays of light in her childhood, namely her anarchist grandfather and some intimate, child's-eye-view scenes of local Tammany Hall bosses. She escapes to college where she hooks up with a gang of mostly lesbian poets including one of my heroes, Audre Lorde who reappears briefly and sporadically throughout.

Next come the Beats. My thing with them, is like, thank you for mostly sacrificing your lives to make enough of a crack in the crushing conformity for the rest of us to exist, for the 60s to happen, hell, even for shows like Girls. No di Prima, no Girls. Simple as that. But at the same time, jeez louise, what a bunch of jerks. Di Prima is kind of famously the other woman in a triangle with LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and Hettie Jones. She's looking back on it all from the 1990s in this book, and she admits mistakes and expresses regret for some things, but she seems kind of proud of how damn Sicilian and Cool she was as Roi's "mistress." Don't get me wrong, Kerouac's dick moves bug me just as much. Then again, these people were very young when they decided to take on our enemies with poetry and most of them were rewarded with extreme poverty and electroshock so ... yeah... she sleeps around, she does a lot of drugs, she does stuff that maybe doesn't jive with the ethics of whatever is left of a "counter-culture" today but would we even have books about how to do polyamory without wild women like di Prima pioneering it all?

Following recent medical advice, I've been trying to meditate regularly, and I had kind of forgotten how these guys were all into some half-assed orientalistic mysticism, another of the things that sometimes turns me off about Kerouac or Ginsberg, but di Prima puts it in better context, pointing out how hard it was back then to get reliable translations, how cats like the little Suzuki had only just arrived in the country and at least in her case it seems clear that there is a real interest, that exploring these traditions was part of the larger, essentially revolutionary project (like when Ginsberg dropped an Ohm on the shouty judge and lawyer during the Chicago 8 trial), and if they got some stuff wrong, it's just like the pre-sexual revolution free love and drug abuse stuff and if we're any wiser about Zen Buddhism in the so-called West today it's partly because of people like di Prima.

She was also involved deeply in a lot of avant garde theater, dance and film in New York in the early 60s and it is interesting how people with basically no money are able to finance these things and also how they are constantly getting busted for them too. It's easy to forget that they are talking about homosexuality and using profanity on stage at a time when all that invited eviction, arrest, beatings and heavy fines. So there is an air of paranoia, and close friends of di Prima disappear or die in horrible 60s ways but she just seems unflappable in the face of it all. Not uncaring, just unbeatable. Also, her attitude to homosexuality and her own sexuality is refreshingly queer. Be prepared to stumble on words that are no longer PC, but when you zoom out and think about her attitude in the context of not only pre-Stonewall but far away from Daughters of Bilitis and other 'homophile' groups of the time... she's really cool.

True to the title, this book will confirm what you already suspect, that while the more famous Beats are getting all the credit, women like di Prima are typing the chapbooks, running the mimeographs, licking the stamps, stuffing the envelopes, tearing the tickets and taking care of 3 kids... oh yeah... the kids... man... birth is ... let's just say I am not a fan, and advise everyone not to get pregnant. Giving birth is strong stuff. And at the time and place that di Prima is doing it... actually all the reproductive health stuff in this book... it's intense and awful. It's just unbelievable how the medical establishment and the laws back then could make some already traumatic experiences even worse, like way worse. Wow.

Well, I'm going to leave it at that, and leave it at 4 stars instead of 5 because true to her Beat-ness, this book kind of rambles and goes off the rails here and there. Not that my review is innocent of that. But di Prima's memoir is a must-read if you ever had any kind of fun in lower Manhattan.

[David Guy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this astonishing and inspiring memoir—424 tightly packed pages full of remarkably detailed writing, which covers maybe 30 years of a hugely eventful life—there are several moments that stand out for me. One is when, in the midst of her sophomore year at college, Diane di Prima left home for good.

She’d been raised as a New York child in various parts of the city, ultimately residing in an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn that I’m somewhat familiar with, since my son lives nearby. She had a grandmother who was memorable, warm and loving, but her parents were frightened angry people, who circumscribed Diane’s life with strictures and punished her with severe beatings, her father with his fists (for the life of me I can’t understand a parent treating a child that way). School was not a total relief, because in the ethnic mix that is New York, there were kids who made fun of her and beat her up for being Italian. One activity her parents didn’t limit was reading, and Diane did that voraciously. She loved poetry from an early age, and began to write it herself.

She doesn’t mention that she was an all-star at school. So we’re startled—at least I was—to find that when she took the Regents, the tests that determine what high school you can enter in the byzantine system of New York schools, the results were published in the newspaper (!), and di Prima finished first, in all of New York. There was a little more freedom in her life from then on, not only because she travelled elsewhere in Manhattan to go to school, but because she and some other artistic girls, attended classes at various places, pretty much doing what they wanted. She already saw herself as a poet, and when she went to college chose Swarthmore, which seemed suitably intellectual for her and was all right with her parents, who were hoping for some distinguished professional career.

She had other ideas, but was discouraged from the start when the place seemed to focus on academics and not the arts themselves. Her first English professor made vague reference to the fact that, though the students might be interested in writing themselves, in that class they would learn to be critics. She had hooked up with two or three other rebellious women, and early in their sophomore year they’d had enough. They decided to drop out of college, get an apartment in the East Village and set themselves up as artists. We’re talking 1952 or ’53, when you could still find places to live cheaply, so you could pay for them with part-time employment. Her parents blew up at this news, her mother going into hysterics, her father giving her one last beating, but she had already sent a friend out a side door with a suitcase full of belongings. She had set out on her own. She was free.

I was stunned by what she said about being an artist.

“What I do know is that choosing to be an artist: writer, dancer, painter, musician, actor, photographer, sculptor, you name it, choosing to be any of these things in the world I grew up in, the world of the 40’s and early 50’s, was choosing as completely as possible for those times the life of the renunciant. Life of the wandering sadhu, itinerant saint, outside the confines and laws of that particular and peculiar culture.

“. . . In the striving to get-ahead thrust of America 1950, where nothing existed beyond the worlds of the senses, the clearest way to turn from materialism was to turn to the arts.

“To be an outcast, outrider was the calling. Not fame, or publication. Keeping one’s hands clean, not engaging. By staying on the outside we felt they weren’t our wars, our murders, our mistakes.”

The next startling thing she did—this is in the mid-fifties, when the rest of us were watching I Love Lucy and Captain Video—was decide to have a baby. In the bohemian world she occupied, both the aesthetic and the lifestyle were the epitome of cool. You were cool with everything. It was fine to have a number of lovers, it was fine if some were men and some women, it was fine if some were officially committed to other people, but it was still astonishing, in the Beat world she occupied, for an unattached woman to have a baby. She wanted to do that to fulfill herself as a woman. She had never wanted a husband, because her father had been such a burden in her family. She just wanted a child.

It was after she had this first child, a girl named Jeanne, that she had her first true love affair, with a woman named Bonnie. Until then she’d been to bed with a number of people, but hadn’t been intimate. Something about having a child made things different.

“Giving birth for the first time, delving deeper into my own woman-nature, had left me more open than ever for an affair with a woman. I needed someone to mirror back to me some of the softness—and yes, the mystery—I was beginning to discover in myself. And to lead me further, teach me secrets of my own sexuality.

“This of childbirth, of being opened from the inside out, I thought, was how you truly lost your virginity. Torn open so the world could come through. Come through you. Not the semipleasant invasion from a man, excursus from the outside in. That in itself, by itself, was merely invitation. Some kind of beginning. Now I felt the joy, the power, of being OPEN. Something unconquerable and deep about it. Place from which I live. Twice torn.

“And I needed my body honored for what it was. What it had become. What I had learned it could be. . . . It was no longer mine now, a private preserve, but there for the kid to climb on whenever she would. That one fact alone changed me—that I truly did not own my physical self. Changed everything about who I was in the world. What flesh really is. A woman’s secret knowledge.”

Bonnie was a painter of considerable talent; either she would come to Diane’s apartment after working all day, or Diane would go to her place—in an even sketchier neighborhood—to be with her while she painted. Diane for years had lived in a world where, if you could make rent, you had your own place and welcomed other people; if you couldn’t, you crashed with friends. She made money as an artist’s model and a clerk at a bookstore, always had one apartment or another. A young gay dancer friend named Freddie. often crashed with her, and she would use him as a babysitter, or ask a neighbor upstairs to help out. She continued to have an untrammeled life even when she had a child.

As if she wasn’t on the fringes enough—a single mother living in Manhattan who had never been married, and had a lesbian lover—she next fell in love, famously, with a black man, the poet Leroi Jones, who was himself married to a white woman and had two children with her. Until then, having a romance with someone’s husband had been off limits for di Prima, and Jones’ wife Hettie wasn’t thrilled with the idea (though she was accustomed to his sleeping around), but at this point di Prima felt that, if she was being true to her emotions, having this affair was what she should do.

She soon got pregnant, and at Jones’ insistence, had an illegal abortion (she describes that process in detail, all it entailed. It was part of the life of a woman in those days). She later got pregnant again, and decided she wanted to have the child. We’re still in the fifties here, and di Prima has had two out-of-wedlock children, one of them mixed race. Somehow she seemed to be making it all work in this wild lifestyle she led, which also involved substantial use of drugs. The group she lived in believed in that.

“It is hard, in our present era of self-righteousness, to even begin to imagine what drugs and the taking of drugs meant to us in the late 1950s. How special and, indeed, precious it was—what promise it held. Hard to imagine where to begin in the telling of it. . . .

“Consciousness itself was a good. And anything that took us outside—that gave us the dimension of the box we were caught in, an aerial view, as it were—showed us the exact arrangement of the maze we were walking, was a blessing. A small satori.”

I won’t say I agree with all of the choices di Prima made, but I do think she led a remarkable life and led it on her own terms. I admired the way she stayed true to herself and to her life as an artist. If at this point, she made what I think of as a truly stupid decision—she decided to marry an actor named Alan Marlowe, who was primarily gay and proposed marriage more or less as a business alliance—I can understand why she did it. She had two children, and her life was increasingly precarious.

Marlowe had money from commercials he’d made and seemed able to help support her (that wasn’t actually true. She wound up supporting him as much as he supported her). They made this decision on a trip to L.A. when he was looking, fruitlessly, for acting work, and though the last part of this book, while they were married, wasn’t as interesting to me as what came before (they founded various small theaters back in New York, and di Prima devoted herself to that work, and then set up a printing press to help get things into print), their wedding was the highlight of the whole book for me. They had made their way to San Francisco, and found an obscure Buddhist priest named Shunryu Suzuki, who agreed to at least talk to them about their marriage, then to marry them. It would be a fateful meeting for di Prima.

“Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was the first person I ever met for whom I felt immediate and total trust. It was something which I had never expected to experience. Every sense, every brain cell and nerve fiber in me suddenly woke up. I felt alert, and watchful, and euphoric, all at once. . . .

“It was that he was so simply and utterly there, standing in that dim room, looking at us. There was a nakedness about it. No cover-up, no attitude at all. His gaze was flat, and extraordinarily deep. I felt he saw into and through me, and in spite of, or perhaps because of that seeing, he was totally kind.

“I knew then and there, that whatever it was he did, I wanted to do it. So that I could begin to see what he saw. Think like him.”

Di Prima ends her book with a final page that sums up everything she’s done since, for the past thirty years (she seemed to be writing in the early nineties). All of that sounds fascinating, and she ends her book with the sentence, “Maybe I’ll write about some of it sometime.”

I’m hoping she did, and that this writing will find its way into print.

www.davidguy.org

[Sally Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

DiPrima lived an interesting life with many historical male characters, while she tried to bring the female into the Beat Scene from its inception on.

[Nicolien · Rating 4 out of 5]

"But most particularly, it was being away from my life that was important, not just leaving behind the "life of art" that New York was. I had in some way invented a world--there on East Houston Street at the start of the 60s--a way of being, that for all its satisfactions was more demanding than I realized. Or than I could sustain, though I was far from admitting that.
There was the commitment to poetry, the commitment to Jeanne, of course, those two I knew about, but, without really acknowledging them or even knowing how they had come about there were also the commitments to Roi (to be available, to be loving, to be cool, not to get in the way of anything that was going on including of course his other affairs, but nonetheless to be utterly present when he wanted me, to be beautiful, t awaken willingly at any hour for love, for conversation, to do my part on The Floating Bear, and on time, too); and the commitments to Freddie and Jimmy and the ensuing collection of good friends and artist buddies (to keep an open house except when I was with Roi, to have food available, and grass and counsel, and warmth and kindness, and a "real" home which was real partly because it included a child, which almost nobody else's did, to be unflappable, to write every day but never when they wanted to visit, or needed something, or when it was time for dance class or rehearsal); and the commitments to the larger New York society of artists of all kinds (to be funny not to lay trips on anyone, not to be gauche in carrying on my love affair(s), not to force anyone to take sides - in love affairs or in art controversies, to look nice at parties, to be sexy but know without being told who was and wasn't gay, to be a staunch revolutionary without getting heavy about it, not to make a fuss if my work got ignored because I was a woman).

This was just part of it, Now writing these lines on a beautiful Indian summer afternoon in San Francisco, all of these things more than thirty years behind me, I find myself wondering who wrote the contract I am describing, and how and when I had agreed to it. What on God's earth was the offer I couldn't refuse?

(p. 262-263)

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a strange reading experience for me. I am not actually familiar with di Prima's work. I've known her name for a while (I went through my requisite Beat phase as a teenager) and read a poem or two here or there, but I wasn't driven to read this out of any real commitment to the life and work of Diane di Prima. However I found myself quite taken with her artistic vision and energy. She manifested a deep, engaged life as an artist despite the struggles inherent in being an unorthodox woman in the middle of the twentieth century. It was interesting to read about all her various projects, from poetry—of course—to theater to publishing to dance as well as her experiences as a mother.
But I started by saying it was a strange experience. For much of my reading, I found myself annoyed by aspects of this book, aspects that perhaps are inherent in any memoir: It is riddled with contradictions. Again, perhaps this is the nature of trying to put together one's life, but in one paragraph di Prima tells that her mom cared for her after she gave birth to her first child, and then in the next paragraph, she tells us how hard it was that her parents had disowned her as soon as she got pregnant out of wedlock. She spends pages and pages telling us how much distrust and annoyance she has for Alan Marlowe, and then the next thing I know, they're getting married. Small and large contradictions appear throughout, and I found myself yelling at her on a number of occasion (despite being on public transportation while reading). But while I was frustrated by this, I don't think I would have cared so much if I wasn't so invested in her story, in fully understanding who she was and how she made the decisions and life she did. I think my frustration was a sign of how much I enjoyed reading her life.

[Anna Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

My dad saw I was reading this book and he asked, "Diane di Prima, wasn't she somebody's girlfriend?" She may have had an affair with LeRoi Jones, but no way was she just "somebody's girlfriend." The book details her life and struggles as an independent woman and writer. The Beat Generation was mostly a boy's club, but di Prima was definitely a part, and not just somebody's chick.

The book is long, but she fully conveys what it was like to be a woman/writer/iconoclast in the decades she writes about. And she also gives lovely descriptions of things such as the makeshift theater group she was a part of and how she printed her work. And I love her for her adolescent vow to become a poet, a vow to Keats.

This book reminded me of Patti Smith's Just Kids, in the way that it showed a strong woman's role in a creative generation. And di Prima's relationship with her best friend Freddie Herko reminded me of Patti and Robert Mapplethorpe. Di Prima is much more opinionated, and she likes to talk about "magick" and "truth" a lot. Her book lags in some parts, but it is definitely worth a read.

Also I kind of wish I could be buddies with her crowd, especially Frank O'Hara. I now know that he was a very supportive friend.
Who knew?

[Shannon]

'What I saw then was this fairly obvious faculty of art: that it goes on, it lasts a bit longer than our frail human lives--it offers comfort. The vision is more enduring than our persons--it uplifts us past the vicissitudes of time, uplifts till it, too, is done or forgotten: ten years, five hundred years. It is the working of our loving hearts, burrowing out of us into the light of day. Like Bodhisattvas we bring this liberation, this solace to each other when we are simply ambitious: working for fame, as Keats once thought he was doing. Working for money or glory. What we are left with is finally what we leave: this reaching out to touch, to comfort others. To make the world beatable, possible at all.' p108

'It was about this time I made what I thought of as my decision not to be beautiful. [...] What I meant to do was never rely on beauty. No easy commerce between myself and love. Myself and sex.' p114-116

[Sabrina Chapadjiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just an incredible memoir.

I've now read it twice, which is something I rarely do - and I have a feeling this book will follow me for the rest of my life.

Diane DiPrima is most well known as being basically the only famed female writer of the Beat Generation. Holding her own in a scene where women were treated as accessories, here, she explores the beautiful path she sculpted through the minefields of her Italian family, the birth of the beat movement, and the incredible art scene of the '50s and '60s. Through it all, DiPrima writes beautifully about her unrelenting commitment to art and how she had to navigate that being a woman. Staunchly independent, thrillingly introspective, and wildly unabashed - here is a memoir from a woman unafraid to live life, and live it on her terms. She's a fucking icon, and easily and tantalizingly leads you down the portals of her beautiful mind in this beautiful book. Easily the best memoir I've ever read.

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling memoir of di Prima's experience growing up in Italian New York City and as a crucial figure in the downtown "beat"/"avant grade" art scene of the late 50s and early-mid 60s. Her fierce commitment to independence--psychological, social, political, aesthetic--and to her artistic vocation are inspirational. Her life was complicated and she's clear about the fact that she made some mistakes--witness her relationships with Leroi Jones and Alan Matlow--but that was the price of the ticket. Anyone seriously interested in the artistic world of the 50s and 60s should read this book.

I'm very much hoping there's a sequel on the way.

[ABC · Rating 2 out of 5]

I loved her descriptions and enthusiasm for life during her teen years in NYC during the mid to late 1950s. She lost me when she married a sadistic gay man and had his child, adding to the two children she already had. I just kept wondering: what about the kids? Especially during the parts when she would be doing some gnarly psychedelic or would stay up all night totally immersed in plays and poetry. Also, I'm dying to know since all of her kids are adults now, are they happy? Does she have a good relationship with them?

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot of very interesting stuff about New York in the 1950s and the early beatnik action before the scene became commodified, and, in diPrima's words, "awful poetry proliferated like crabgrass on Long Island lawns."

When she gets into the 60s and marries a mostly gay man she hates, who treats her like shit, and gets into acid and speed, she kind of loses me as I couldn't help but wonder how tough all that must have been for her kids. Call me a square if you must.

"We were pushing the envelope of 'cool' a little, I guess." [P.247:]
Uh, yup.

[Gee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magical memoir full of gorgeous detail, badass queer womanhood, femininity (often essentialist, ugh), and poetry poetry poetry. The perfect culmination, to me, of spirituality and poetry. Very inspiring for anyone seeking a change in life.

[L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the hell out of this book when I was 15, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was still awesome when it came back from a years-long loan to a friend.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought she was pretty annoying, but what do I know.

[Alannah Irwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carried this book around like it was my Bible my first two years of college!

[Melondrop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through so much of this epic memoir, I wavered between awe and intense frustration, inspiration and something like regret, or jealousy. I loved reading Diane Di Prima’s stalwart perspectives on what it means to be alive, make art — the intensity of making art in a time when everything different was suspect, when even following a “macrobiotic diet” was cause for suspicion and arrest - let alone being gay, being a single woman, being a street walker and fluid in gender long before gender fluidity was a catch-all term. I also struggled with her life decisions, her seemingly inexplicable engagements and marriages to toxic, abusive, self centered baby men. But she wasn’t perfect, and wrote without self deprecation but also mostly without delusion, of the ways and shapes her life took. I breathed through and ultimately deeply appreciated her struggles with art: “am I a real writer?” Her devotion to various men-in-art, even fascists like Pound, confounded me, but in some cases also re-reminded me to be at least open to beauty and insight everywhere. Try not to write people off solely because of their identities, from any direction, in a time when it feels often like the only thing to do with male writers is avoid them.

So much here, so much richness. I felt it, a nostalgia for a time I never even lived, not by a long shot. The ghost nostalgia for living an “alt” life before it was beyond cliche, when it was just a glimmer in their ancestors’ eyes. To be able to fully invest in creating art as revolution — before everything was ruined, it feels, forever, utterly bespoiled by the internet and utter corporate co-optation of art, in addition to so many other things. I want to return to Diane’s rituals, to her considerations of what it means to write, her immersion in so many mediums, her transition into Zen, and seeing the world through a “unifying principle.” I want to write til the incense stick burns out, and still my mind for a finite time. Against all odds, and with a Will to guide me.

[Kari Burk · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book's title contains elements (strategically placed, not 'in your face') that allude to the creatively progressive community minded feminist that Ms.di Prima was.
Note: The title isn't claiming any wordsmith territory (though the author was a magnificent wordsmith and the thread of continuity in the book is most definitely the author's commitment to writing) which makes me think that her chosen perspective in this book is more about 'life' and how a person chooses to do 'life'
The author's recollection of being a child and her honorable struggle for independence as a young woman/mother with commitment to writing and assisting other writers in getting their work printed is beautiful and occasionally heart wrenching to read. Her admission and explanation of years of drug use (benny's, LSD, cocaine) gave me a different understanding of that kind of 'chosen' lifestyle.
My introduction to Diana di Prima's writing was by way of a book found on the freebie shelf of our local library years ago (a collection of poetry by The Beat Generation where a few of Ms.di Prima's excellent "Revolutionary Letters" are included) which then inspired me to poke around further for more of her writing. Her autobiography is a rich and emotionally engaging read that inspired me to buy a gorgeous hard cover 50th anniversary edition of City Lights Pocket Poet Series of Ms. di Prima's 'Revolutionary Letters' which feels beautifully 'full circle' as this was the initial writing that brought me to 'the way of Diana di Prima'

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

So... I think I'm now a person that enjoys memoirs. Even memoirs that includes retellings of dreams. And I usually HATE it when people tell me their dreams. But I liked this book.

This was messy, contradictory, the author has several blind spots regarding her own motivations, and she and I are alike in many ways, mostly in ways that I regard as negative about myself, so there's that!

Interestingly, I had recently read How I Became Hettie Jones earlier this month, and both of these books focus on the author's relationship with LeRoi Jones (later changed his name to Amiri Baraka). Diane's focus also included a lot about Hettie. Hettie's book has little to say about Diane, which I found interesting, but only in a purely academic sense, as I wasn't part of their set, i wasn't even alive during this time period, and man, LeRoi certainly didn't treat either one of them well. (I don't think that is a spoiler)

Anyhow, I added Joyce Johnson's memoir to my TBR list.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

di Prima’s decades long memoir was such a delicious read, documentary-like in nature but infused with raw first-person recollections and emotions. It allows the reader to feel the pulse of New York in the 40s and 50s as told from Diane’s colorful recollection.

This is a story as her evolvement and growth as an artist in every sense in the way, a personal account into her back channel thoughts and movements as she bounces around the fluid set scenes of the mid 1900s. It felt like a wise older mentor recollecting their wild and unbelievable stories of their spunky past. Diane writes from a point of reflection with meticulous detail, detail that is confirmed by snippets of journal entries from the time.

As someone who journals, I loved it. As a poet, I loved it. As an artist in general looking to examples of how to stretch my creativeness into further and unknown limits, I loved it. A personal museum in a book.

[carlyle g · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book nourished and accompanied me through such a huge time of transition in my life. Every time I returned to Di Prima’s words I felt enveloped in comfort and understanding. This is a book that I think everyone should read, Diane Di Prima lived her life freely, raw, without contempt. She truly loved and experienced life. 🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍

“My earliest sense of what it means to be a woman was learned from my grandmother, Antoinette Mallozzi, and at her knee. It was a house of dark and mellow light, almost as if there were fire and kerosene lamps… The light fell on my grandmother’s hands as she sat rocking, saying her rosary. She smelled of lemons and olive oil, garlic and waxes and mysterious herbs. I loved to touch her skin.”

[Lorraine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have had this book on my "to read" list for a number of years since purchasing it in CityLights books in San Francisco several years ago. Diane DiPrima was part of the Beat movement and ahead of her time, but reading her memoir now also makes one realize how time has changed women. Her desire to be a poet and a mother was unheard of in the late 50's and early 60's, but much of her desire to be a mother and eventually marry a gay man whom she doesn't even like is disturbing from a modern perspective. However, this memoir does reveal a long lost New York....where creative types could live cheaply and engage in the arts, however avant-garde .

[Satori ‎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I spent two years of my undergrad singing my praises to Diane di Prima for my honors thesis, it’s a wonder I never read this book. Every page hits so close to home for me. This is the type of book where you read a page and have to stop for a moment and reflect on it. This is absolutely in my top three memoirs.

Diane di Prima you are EVERYTHING to me. rest in peace you beautiful woman. I love you so much.