The Making of a Writer, Volume 2: Journals, 1963-1969
Godwin picks up where the first volume of her involving journals leaves off. In her midtwenties, divorced and determined to write, she is still in London in the 1960s, far from her North Carolina home, diligently penning short stories, working a cushy job at the U.S. Travel Service office, dating constantly, and relying on her journals as a safe place for thinking out her experiences, especially her many complex relationships. What Godwin hopes to do in her fiction is exploit, define, name, place this ever-shifting contest between men and women. She writes of Henry James, Jung, her father’s suicide, and her own dark moments. A fiction class enables her to write the first story of hers to be published; introduces her to her second husband, a psychiatrist and a Scientologist; and leads to her acceptance at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. When her husband reads her journals without her permission, her precarious marriage dissolves, though her journals continue to provide a refuge. Godwin’s provocative chronicle of her apprentice years illuminates fascinating worlds within worlds and affirms the fact that writing requires conviction and assiduousness. --Donna Seaman