Deborah Martinson

Lillian Hellman (b.1905) was a hell-raiser, and she seemed to know everyone in New York who was worth knowing in the 1930s.

The book is tough reading--you have to really want to know something about Hellman to get through it. One review confirms my own opinion: "What won't pass is Martinson's gratingly clumsy and numbingly repetitive prose. Sentence after memory-dumped sentence is strung together with no concern for flow or consistency. Anecdotes lie flat on the page, modifiers are dangled, syntax mangled, names misspelled, facts botched. Most irritating of all, the author insists on including quotes without attribution, forcing you to burrow through her voluminous footnotes to find the speakers in question."

My first pass through this book, my book marker stops at page 55. I won't rate it until I've read more--if I can.… (mehr)