Dependency

"Dependency is startlingly unlike any other memoir about addiction—that I know of, at least. The first way in which Dependency differs from conventional addiction memoirs may seem simple, but it’s astonishingly effective: it doesn’t telegraph from the start that it’s a story about addiction. In an addiction memoir, there’s nothing less surprising than the protagonist developing an addiction. But in a person’s real life, addiction always arrives as a horrific shock, a jarring and outrageous disruption of narrative order. Dependency is the only book I’ve read that captures that experience. For two-and-a-half volumes the Copenhagen Trilogy seems to be the story of Ditlevsen’s unlikely escape from her suffocatingly poor and unhappy origins. A few poems published in a Danish newspaper while she is a teenager provide an entrée to the literary world, and in time she is one of the most celebrated writers in her country. Then, one day, after having an illegal abortion, a doctor gives her a dose of the heroin-like painkiller Demetrol—and her life changes irrevocably: ‘I decide never to let go of a man who can give me such an indescribable blissful feeling.’ She leaves her husband for the doctor, a virtual stranger, and invents an ear infection to finagle more and more of the drug out of him, eventually undergoing dangerous surgery on a perfectly healthy ear to maintain the fiction. When I first came across this book, having barely survived my own experience with drugs, I doubted anything I read on the subject could shock me. But nothing could have prepared me for this astonishing story and the way it conjures the insanity of the addict: a person in utter misery who will do virtually anything, however ruinous or degrading, to exacerbate it. And taking care to leave the reader unprepared is one way in which Ditlevsen’s writing succeeds in being so gripping and moving. The other main thing that sets Ditlevsen apart from most authors of addiction memoir is in her use of narrative point of view. Such books typically have a kind of dual narrator: sometimes caught up in events perceived through the author’s shortsighted younger eyes; at other times dispensing commentary or insight from the loftier perspective of—we presume—the author’s current self. “In real life, addiction always arrives as a horrific shock, a jarring and outrageous disruption of narrative order” Ditlevsen’s trilogy, by contrast, plunges us into the perspective of a succession of her former selves. When she’s a child, we’re presented with the world as a child might see it. When she’s hooked on Demetrol, we perceive events through the distorted viewpoint of an addict. This is the kind of myopic or unreliable narrator we encounter frequently in novels – conspicuously naïve or self-delusive, and unchaperoned by a consolingly wise authorial presence—but almost never in memoir. Told in the present tense (another rarity in autobiography), the result is a stunningly immersive and intimate story. We seem to experience Ditlevsen’s life with her, moment by vivid moment. I revere this book, but there is one false note in it: the final page or so, where Ditlevsen rather abruptly tries to persuade us she’s found salvation in love—and therefore that, in De Quincey’s words, “these troubles are past”. For the first time in the trilogy, we see the author seduced by her narrator’s fantasy. The convention that addiction memoirs should conclude on a definite note of redemption often produces endings that are psychologically or aesthetically trite—and, relatedly, that are belied by the subsequent facts of the author’s life. In both respects, this is particularly true here: five years after Dependency was published, Ditlevsen died by suicide. Ditlevsen’s failure of nerve, causing her to wrap up three volumes of the most trenchant and unillusioned autobiography ever written with a feeble daydream, is easily explained. She surely felt the reader (and perhaps the author) had endured too much pain in the preceding story to be sent away without solace. The fact that, in so doing, she effectively obeyed a formal convention of addiction memoir helps explain how many of those conventions arose. It was not due to some kind of lineage of influence reaching back to De Quincey, but the inevitable result of applying the simplifying dictates of storytelling and lowest-common-denominator audience needs to roughly similar experiences. The fact that even a great artist like Ditlevsen can capitulate to such dictates, if only once, demonstrates how powerful they are. But Ditlevsen’s single conventional moment also, I think, underlines her originality. The reason Dependency doesn’t look anything like an ordinary addiction memoir isn’t primarily that the form and its conventions didn’t exist when she wrote it; it’s that Ditlevsen understood exactly how readers would expect her to tell her story, and she that staying true to it would mean finding another way. The result was a tale whose bracing darkness is ultimately redeemed not by its perfunctorily hopeful ending but by the extraordinary force and beauty of its telling."