Recommend: Yes.
In all landscapes there are ‘cool’ trends that everyone thinks they identify with. If it’s a tea, everyone thinks they’re a matcha. If it’s a TV show, everyone wants to be White Lotus. If it’s a croissant, there’s no question, the only respectable way to be is Lune. The literary subculture equivalent would be the Beat generation.
The Beatniks are known for their no-strings-attached relationships and ever-growing, ever-changing friendship circles. They are known for their disownment of corporate culture and consumerism. They are known for having a lot of sex.
Memoirs of a Beatnik is slightly dishonest though. It is not a strict memoir, although Diane Di Prima was undoubtedly a Gold Class member of that scene. Memoirs of a Beatnik is a perfect example of autobiographical fiction because surely no one fucks that hard in real life…
This is a lot of preamble to avoid describing the contents of Memoirs of a Beatnik.
From page one the tone is set. The topic is locked in. There’s no where to hide. If Memoirs of a Beatnik was turned into a television series, I am not sure I’d have the right subscriptions to access it.
This is a porno. NSFW. XXX.
If there’s a paragraph that doesn’t start with sex, you can be guaranteed it will end with it, somehow. Diane goes to get a job to make ends meet: it’s posing for pornographic photos. Diane spends Summer on a farm, cooking and taking care of the domestics: she fucks her lover’s father. Diane goes to an all-female college to study: sapphic orgy.
I find that there’s not much I need to explain as to why I enjoyed Di Prima’s ‘fiction’. The writing is unpretentious. The characters can be drawn with a satisfying depth. There are some scenes so clearly drawn they felt cinematic – in particular, a yachting excursion with childhood friend and the friend’s eccentric, boundaryless family. The narrator (Di Prima herself, it’s a high likelihood) flits around with so many people and extracts from them their best, yet always feels comfortable with herself and by herself. She is a sturdy rock for us readers to cling to amongst the oncoming waves of that dynamic social sphere.
And then, after all the stimulation and enjoyment, towards the end you can feel Di Prima starting to age out of the chaotic Beat lifestyle and the prose widens gracefully into reflection, with an edge of fatalism snuck spikily under the waning glut of hedonism.
You never do get to go back to anything, but it really takes a long time to learn that…
Memoirs of a Beatnik is smut. Well written, enjoyable smut.
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