Hope Diamond Refuses

by Iris Owens

Hope Diamond, a feisty New York dame, goes off to the Mideast to find and confront her ex-husband - and also crack some jokes. This is the 2d and last novel Owens wrote. She's mostly known as Harriet Daimler for her Olympia Press porn novels from the 50s.

Genres: Novels

193 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Iris Owens (née Klein) (1929–2008) was born and raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of a professional gambler. She attended Brooklyn College, was briefly married, and then moved to Paris, where she fell in with Alexander Trocchi, the editor of the legendary avant-garde journal Merlin and a notorious heroin addict. Owens supported herself by producing pornography, or DBs as she referred to Dirty Books, (under the name of Harriet Daimler) for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. She also married an Iranian prince. Resettled in NYC, Owens wrote After Claude (1973). A second novel, Hope Diamond Refuses, loosely based on her second marriage, was published in 1984.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ignore this failure and read "The Woman Thing" by Harriet Daimler -- it's the same author before 2d and 3d thoughts/ inhibitions/excess dope undid her. Owens herself was briefly married to an Iranian prince; they parted good friends. She spent over 7 years of indecision, rewriting and faffing around on this novel, then came up against a brick wall w her 2d editor, Vicky Wilson, at Knopf. NYT reviewer, the corrupt Anatole Broyard, slammed her because she'd once panned a book by a squeeze. She said, "My advice to writers is never review books." Alas, this slim, very bad novel about an American woman who married an Iranian prince has only a few comic moments. Other than 2 or 3 magazine pieces, she never wrote anything again. Her posturings here cost her two editors and her agent. She died in 2008.

[Laurel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who cares if a writer can only write one good character? Didion's heroines are all simulacra of herself - wan and deference in a wrap skirt. Joy Williams (novels pre-1990) writes the women in the throes of male dominance and definition through child-rearing. Iris Owens writes Harriet from After Claude into the same woman as Hope Diamond. She's defiant; she chooses to ignore the reality. And I guess Owens would owe Didion, if Owens herself didn't actually live through all of this. I mean, a woman who can't comply with societal rules, who marries the obsolescent third-world royal, stuck between the old world and the new? Sure, I've read it all before, but that doesn't mean I won't want to read it all again. The balance is tenuous, the times are a-changin', women could believe it would all work out for them someday. Keep the watch ticking Hope Diamond.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe not as stylish as "After Claude", but dark, bitchy, hilarious, and sadly forgotten.

[Bookend McGee · Rating 2 out of 5]

A let-down after the wit and clever brilliance of After Claude.

[Vizzy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Never have I ever had a book I couldn't finish on my nightstand for 6+ months! And I bough the freakin copy too! SHUCKS!