Tag Archives: Lillian Hellman

A Year in Books/Day 168: An Unfinished Woman

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  • Title: An Unfinished Woman
  • Author: Lillian Hellman
  • Year Published: 1969/This Edition: 1999 (Little, Brown and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: The Children’s Hour. The Little Foxes. Another Part of the Forest. Watch on the Rhine. The lady knew how to craft plays strong enough to withstand not only their first march across the footlights, but so brilliant as to be timeless decades later. In An Unfinished Woman-the first of three memoirs written in her twilight years-she breaks off pieces of her jaded public persona until something of the real Lillian shows through. Exactly what is anybody’s guess, but the feeling of rightness is there. Her writing is so forceful and engaging, and seemingly forthright, that it is easy to forget that any writer’s autobiography is by nature (if to varying degrees) a study in fiction. Writers are their own best characters, after all. She weaves such a fine story that the ratio of unadulterated fact to pure fiction to soaring imagination is basically immaterial. Her tale, her viewpoint, is riveting. Facts may be found elsewhere; this book is where the entertainment is located. It won the National Book Award. The foreword to this edition is by the incredible Wendy Wasserstein.
  • Motivation: I love plays. Love love them. As in, I want to go steady with them kind of love. Got it? They are my second favourite written medium. I also love weird, strong, talented, crazy-ass smart, contrary women.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 43: “I would like to say these many years later that I remember his questions. But I don’t, and for a good reason: he had already decided on whatever he meant to write and the questions were fitted to his decisions. So most of the time we didn’t know what he was talking about.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9