![]() ![]() ![]() They sit alone in hotel rooms, looking for men to abuse them and drinking themselves into oblivion. She writes about women who dedicate themselves to the manufacture of agony, and who seek out situations of pain to feed on. Her early books are about herself - she draws the mental template of the embryonic alcoholic. She left for England at 17, and became a chorus girl she barely saw her family again. She was born in 1890 in Dominica, in the West Indies, the daughter of a Welsh doctor. She takes me into the isolated room, and I just want to drink with her. I am an alcoholic writer with seven years of abstinence but, when I read Jean Rhys, I want to drink. "I only ever write about my life," she said, and, with a bottle in one hand, and a pencil in the other, she drew the most evocative self-portrait of an insane female writer in print. She was helpless she wanted to destroy herself and she did, and between the blackouts and the chaos, the occasional novel leaked out. Her life was an opera of violence and self-destruction. Lilian Pizzichini has written a portrait of Jean Rhys - the patron saint of alcoholic writers. Why does she seem to want to kill herself with drugs? Is the source of her pain the source of her genius? We seem to have been asking these questions for years, as she disintegrates yet further, live on Sky News.īut a superb new book has just come out that provides clues. A my Winehouse turns her black, bewildered eyes towards the cameras and we too are bewildered. ![]()
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