You ask if a man who wrote as Jane did would be more famous? A man, of course, could not write as she did.—Millicent Dillon

Over the course of her illustrious forty-year writing career, Millicent Dillon has won five O. Henry awards and been nominated for a PEN/Faulkner. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and invitations to such prestigious writing residences as Yaddo.

Dillon is also the world’s expert on the Bowleses, one of America’s most extraordinary and puzzling literary couples. Her book, You Are Not I, is the definitive biography of Paul Bowles, author of copious fiction and nonfiction, including The Sheltering Sky, which Bertolucci made in 1990 into a movie with John Malkovic and Debra Winger, and the shockingly realistic 1940s stories of violence, sex, and alien culture, “A Distant Episode,” “The Delicate Prey,” and “Pages from Cold Point,” which, said Norman Mailer much later, long before their time “opened the world of Hip.”

Dillon is also the author of A Little Original Sin, the only biography of Paul’s wife, the brilliant Jane Bowles—author of one Broadway play, a handful of stories, a puppet play, and the 1943 novel Two Serious Ladies, which has just been reissued by Sort of Books in the UK. Jane, even more than Paul, was a writer of such unique talent and vision that even those literary experts who embrace experimentalists like James Joyce and William Faulkner have never known what to do with her.

I’ve been fascinated by the Bowleses ever since I found A Little Original Sin and My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles in a San Francisco bookstore in 1995. Who were these people? What is the truth behind their enigma? And what must it have been like to travel to Morocco shortly after Jane’s tragic death in the early 1970s, an accomplished fiction author yourself, to meet and become friends with the mysterious Paul, to whom so many aspiring writers of that era—including the Beats—flocked like pilgrims?

Join me on Monday for:

The Forces Within: the Millicent Dillon interview