In her book Nell Dunn interviewed nine women she knew: Pauline Boty, Kathy Colier, Frances Chadwick, Edna O'Brien, Emma Charlton, Ann Quin, Antonia Simon, Suna Portman and Paddy Kitchen. This is a review of the book by Katharine Whitehorn in The Observer.
Television has been borrowing from books since it started; now we have the process in reverse, a book of interviews: presumably cut but otherwise presented in all their wasteful, rambling, ungrammatical informality. It provokes the usual irritation you feel when someone has printed a question-and-answer interview instead of writing the article, but it has the fascination of a good “Face to Face”.
Nell Dunn (“Up the Junction”) talks to nine women, all about the same age – late twenties or thereabouts, all pretty, , most creative. Her subjects are things like whether marriage is out of date, whether eroticism is the same as sensuality, how women feel about having babies, whether they know the difference between right and wrong.
The interesting thing is that though these women vary enormously in their predicaments – one is sexless, one frustrated, some have children, some have, not - and reject conventional standards, they share an almost identical code . They believe in complete sexual freedom , though they are racked by jealousy, they are not all materialistic or class-conscious ; they believe in the paramount importance of human relationships (although they discuss only those with confidantes or lovers, they don’t mention things like aunts or employers). They are terrifyingly brave, often pessimistic and they all have an overriding sense of their own identity, their own fulfilment: which is what the book is supposed to be about.
Compared to all the tepid little conformists who feel they have to get settled at 20, these tigerish priestesses of spontaneity have enormous vitality, enormous appeal. But they are so like characters in a novel that is shattering to think of them leading actual lives, bearing actual children. Their rejection of stability would certainly be more attractive if they didn’t have children: Ann Quin, who doesn’t have any, and Paddy Kitchen, the only one with any sense of family – or indeed any sense – come out of it well for that reason.
But it could be well that the interview form doesn’t do the others justice. The trouble with interviews is that you can answer every question honestly and still give a false, or at least a one-sided impression. There they are, talking on and on about their emotions, it’s impossible to imagine them ever sitting on a committee or reading a newspaper, impossible to guess where their children would go to school, what work their men would do; but they are not given an external context.
The book has been republished by Silver Press, and may be ordered from News from Nowhere, the women's cooperative www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk/page/detail/Talking-to-women/?K=BDZ0035127806
What is intriguing is the position of Nell Dunn in all this. Presumably she chose nine women who share so many viewpoints because she was exploring her own ideas; but in that case, one would have liked more of her own contributions, more conclusions drawn, more connective tissue to give the thing perspective. Still, it’s an absorbing, teasing book, rich, raw material for everyone’s novels.
The book has be republished by Silver Press. www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk/page/detail/Talking-to-women/?K=BDZ0035127806