For Sylvia: An Honest Account

Rating:
Summary: It was okay
Review: Valentine Ackland was an okay writer and she really poured her heart out into this lengthy confessional letter she wrote in hat is said to have been one night to her lover, the UK novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, who herself feared she was about to lose Valentine to another woman, a woman she herself detested. Although the two writers had been living together for many years, Valentine had found herself dangerously attracted to a woman called here only by an initial, "X," an American woman who was nominally straight but who liked the way Valentine succumbed to her. Big hearted Sylvia then offered to let V and "X" live in "Frome Vauchurch," (don't you love these names?)-- the house she herself had restored as a lovers getaway.

What Valentine had secretly been hiding was an addiction to alcohol that made Spencer Tracy look like a teetotaller. This book is sort of like a really good AA tell-all, compounded by snatches of writerly conversation and fraught behavior. Sylvia was a better writer than Valentine, but Valentine certainly knows how to steal center stage. If you like the Lesbian novels of Mary Renault I can almost guarantee you'll like this one. It has some wonderful scenes in it, as Valentine tries and tries to be perfectly honest with her soon-to-be-ex girlfriend--(actually she relented and stayed with Sylvia for years and years)--a painful act of stripping away illusion and getting to the root of things, like dentistry of the emotions.