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Double Drink Story : My Life With Dylan Thomas
Painfully honest about Dylan Thomas and their relationship, Caitlin Thomas provides a memoir of a life dedicated to drink. The book reveals the affairs, the poetry, the thwarted ambitions, the passions and the rage.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 3, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 20, 2015
3.5 stars
This is Cailin Thomas’s account of her life with Dylan Thomas, written many years after his death and after she had given up alcohol. This is really an account of their lives with alcohol. Neither of them come across as likeable and one’s sympathies are inevitably with their children. This isn’t a traditional biographical account, but focuses rather on Caitlin’s feelings about and reactions to Dylan; which were powerful and unpredictable.
The myth of Dylan Thomas is exploded, in terms of how he was to live with. Drink, particularly beer was dominant. He was a raconteur and utterly charming of course. He was also constitutionally incapable of fidelity and totally selfish. There is a lengthy analysis on the effect of drink and its impact on the pair of them. This account is much more impressionistic than Thomas’s previous accounts of her life and not published until after her death. There is a madness and desperation to it which reminds one of books like Leaving Las Vegas; only this isn’t fiction.
Her son to her second husband has edited this and she wrote with his help; he draws similarities with Sylvia Plath. She tried to commit suicide several times and her life in Dylan’s shadow meant that her own talents were neglected. She has been portrayed as drunken (that part is true), irresponsible in relation to her children, unloving and unfaithful to Dylan in her turn. The book illustrates that her attempts at infidelity were a total disaster. She was expected to look after her famous husband and put up with his moods and infidelities and they were certainly violent towards each other. Alcoholism does not lead to good parenting. The real problem is that Dylan was at the same time much more and much less than she expected.
It is a searingly honest account of the effects of alcohol, madness and genius; written by a survivor. The brief account of Caitlin’s childhood are charming and such a contrast with the madness that came after.
This is Cailin Thomas’s account of her life with Dylan Thomas, written many years after his death and after she had given up alcohol. This is really an account of their lives with alcohol. Neither of them come across as likeable and one’s sympathies are inevitably with their children. This isn’t a traditional biographical account, but focuses rather on Caitlin’s feelings about and reactions to Dylan; which were powerful and unpredictable.
The myth of Dylan Thomas is exploded, in terms of how he was to live with. Drink, particularly beer was dominant. He was a raconteur and utterly charming of course. He was also constitutionally incapable of fidelity and totally selfish. There is a lengthy analysis on the effect of drink and its impact on the pair of them. This account is much more impressionistic than Thomas’s previous accounts of her life and not published until after her death. There is a madness and desperation to it which reminds one of books like Leaving Las Vegas; only this isn’t fiction.
Her son to her second husband has edited this and she wrote with his help; he draws similarities with Sylvia Plath. She tried to commit suicide several times and her life in Dylan’s shadow meant that her own talents were neglected. She has been portrayed as drunken (that part is true), irresponsible in relation to her children, unloving and unfaithful to Dylan in her turn. The book illustrates that her attempts at infidelity were a total disaster. She was expected to look after her famous husband and put up with his moods and infidelities and they were certainly violent towards each other. Alcoholism does not lead to good parenting. The real problem is that Dylan was at the same time much more and much less than she expected.
It is a searingly honest account of the effects of alcohol, madness and genius; written by a survivor. The brief account of Caitlin’s childhood are charming and such a contrast with the madness that came after.
June 15, 2013
I've been reading about and around Dylan Thomas lately, and empathising with Caitlin. I read Leftover Life to Kill, the book she wrote six years after his death a long time ago -- or I think I did -- and didn't like it much at the time, although I might feel differently now. I have no idea what I would have been expecting from her.
This book is different. It struck me as honest and hard-won from the start. It is interesting because of the famous poet connection, of course. She and Dylan are like Ted and Sylvia -- doomed celebrities of the poetry scene. But it's really about alcoholism and about herself. There is no self-pity in it at all, though there seem to me to be all sorts of possible explanations for her self-destructive behaviours. As she says, "I had never seen nor heard of the word 'alcoholism' and I had no idea what it meant. Nor had Dylan. It was not so much escaping from reality that we were doing, because the drinking racket was our only practical reality. It was the only reality with which we were familiar. To us it was our normal living.'
I can't help admiring her, the sense of her deep-down strength, her anger, her energy. Not all of the book is about drinking. She is marvellous on horses: her love of riding as a young person. None of the writing is flowery. It is plain but extremely effective. This is an intelligent, thoughtful woman and, as I said earlier, I think her truths are hard-won.
She was just a little older than I am now (61) when she finally got sober. Her brain must have made a good recovery to write like this.
She communicates a lovely sense of Dylan - not just as an inspired drunk. She compares him to Oscar Wilde: "Both Wilde and Dylan were the rare possessors of the authentic joy of life in all its tiniest tributaries. And this mutual joy of life they managed to spread wherever they went."
She fumbles to understand their relationship and who she was in it -- and it is in her inability to define it that she succeeds in writing well: "But what were we really like underneath the alcohol? What was the whole truth about us? The truth is that I have not got a glimmering of a clue. And I still cannot get at it -- not the whole truth, only little bits, stray fragments that emerge out of an impenetrable barrier of alcohol."
I think I might have liked her. I suspect I would have found Dylan -- despite the fact that I love his writing so much -- far more difficult.
This book is different. It struck me as honest and hard-won from the start. It is interesting because of the famous poet connection, of course. She and Dylan are like Ted and Sylvia -- doomed celebrities of the poetry scene. But it's really about alcoholism and about herself. There is no self-pity in it at all, though there seem to me to be all sorts of possible explanations for her self-destructive behaviours. As she says, "I had never seen nor heard of the word 'alcoholism' and I had no idea what it meant. Nor had Dylan. It was not so much escaping from reality that we were doing, because the drinking racket was our only practical reality. It was the only reality with which we were familiar. To us it was our normal living.'
I can't help admiring her, the sense of her deep-down strength, her anger, her energy. Not all of the book is about drinking. She is marvellous on horses: her love of riding as a young person. None of the writing is flowery. It is plain but extremely effective. This is an intelligent, thoughtful woman and, as I said earlier, I think her truths are hard-won.
She was just a little older than I am now (61) when she finally got sober. Her brain must have made a good recovery to write like this.
She communicates a lovely sense of Dylan - not just as an inspired drunk. She compares him to Oscar Wilde: "Both Wilde and Dylan were the rare possessors of the authentic joy of life in all its tiniest tributaries. And this mutual joy of life they managed to spread wherever they went."
She fumbles to understand their relationship and who she was in it -- and it is in her inability to define it that she succeeds in writing well: "But what were we really like underneath the alcohol? What was the whole truth about us? The truth is that I have not got a glimmering of a clue. And I still cannot get at it -- not the whole truth, only little bits, stray fragments that emerge out of an impenetrable barrier of alcohol."
I think I might have liked her. I suspect I would have found Dylan -- despite the fact that I love his writing so much -- far more difficult.
July 18, 2021
Caitlin Macnamara-Thomas was too bright, too strong and too much her own woman to be kept in the shade of the genius that was Dylan Thomas. They brought out the very worse in each other. It's a good read, I don't think you'll like her but think of her living as she did in the austerity of the 1930s/40s/50s and you will have some sympathy I'm sure.
April 21, 2025
I gave this book a one-star not because the book was badly written but I don't think Caitlin should have written it. She was still bitter about her life with Dylan. I don't think she could decide who she was angry with more Dylan for who she felt he was or herself for believing she wasted her life with him or even getting together with him in the first place.
August 29, 2024
This book reveals very little about Caitlin's life with Dylan Thomas. It's a mess of a read, focused mainly on Caitlin's life and drinking. It's a nasty, painful, narcissistic tale.
April 17, 2015
This was an interesting book, but gets a low rating because it was rather depressing and a bit incoherent. Caitlin had an unstructured childhood which seemed to leave her woefully unprepared for life. Her meeting with Dylan Thomas really did her no favours. They adopted a chaotic drink-fuelled lifestyle which had the benefit for him of supporting his life as a poet, but for her, she was in his shadow. In an attempt to keep up with him and to get back at him for his infidelities she adopted a self-destructive way of life. After his death, she moved to Italy and ultimately gave up drink, but reading her account of her life, it all seemed such a waste.
April 6, 2010
Na de eerste 2 hoofdstukken kon ik het verdere verloop van hun leven wel inschatten: drankgebruik, overspel, poëzie schrijven en vooral eigenlijk veel drankgebruik. Waarschijnlijk een boeiend boek als je gepassioneerd bent door het leven en drankprobleem van Dylan Thomas.
September 13, 2012
This is Caitlin Thomas's story of her life with Dylan Thomas. She also writes about life after Dylan and meeting a new husband and bearing a son She was sober for the last 20 years of her life and seemed to enjoy life more than before.
Want to read
August 16, 2008I can imagine that he must have been a demon to live with.
November 30, 2014
Not my cuppa, but with two cats this interesting, I had to read to the end.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews