https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/16/the-copenhagen-tirlogy-by-tove-ditlevsen-review

The Danish writer reflects on success, addiction and divorces in three volumes of compulsive autofiction: Childhood, Youth and Dependency

For the four decades after the outbreak of the second world war, Tove Ditlevsen was one of Denmark’s most famous and extravagantly tortured writers, whose many identities – dreamy working-class misfit, ruthlessly focused artist, ambivalent wife and mother, literary outsider and drug addict – were constantly at war. While always the central protagonist in her dispatches from the frontline of her own life, she never pretended to be the heroine. Which makes it unsurprising that in an era with an appetite for autofiction, her mordant, vibrantly confessional autobiographical work should be experiencing a revival.

Ditlevsen was a famous poet by her early 20s, but she did not consider herself young. Why would she, when a working-class childhood ended at 14? Already she had been sacked as a maid, for scrubbing a piano down with water; been nanny to a boy who announced: “You must do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you”; lived in a boarding house with Hitler’s portrait on the wall; embarked on the first of her four doomed marriages; and taken a lover who sent identical “dear Kitten” letters to all his mistresses.