Linking to Millicent Dillon

This week we’re linking to an excerpt from a novel by Millicent Dillon, A Version of Love.

I know who Dillon is because in 1995 I stumbled across her biography of Jane Bowles in a bookshop in lower Fillmore in San Francisco, A Little Original Sin, introducing me to the extraordinary, baffling, intriguing world of Jane, ever since one of my favorite writers. In the process of researching her biography, Dillon got to know Jane’s husband, the writer Paul Bowles, quite well and eventually wrote a biography of him, too: You Are Not I. Dillon went on to edit the collected letters of Jane, Out in the World (the bulk of them “agonizers” to Paul, as they traveled extensively and often separately throughout their lives, while maintaining an extremely close marriage) and The Viking Portable of Paul and Jane Bowles.

NOT ONLY THAT. But Dillon is an award-winning fiction author herself. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a resident writer at Yaddo and won the O’ Henry Award five times. Her novel Harry Gold was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000.

AND. I have been having a long, luxurious, protracted conversation with her for months now about Jane Bowles, during which she’s commented periodically about her work on her latest novel, which she’s been working on for five years. She just finished it. Take note: you heard it first here.

So I’m recommending that all aspiring writers take a good, hard look at these early chapters of A Version of Love. Notice what she puts in. Notice what she leaves out. Notice the telling details, the significance of the dialog, the exposition that exists only to say something she couldn’t have said any other way.

Most of all, notice the polish. Dillon is a craftsperson of the highest order. This work of hers—in its deceptively simple, meticulous, factual tracking of characters through experience—is the essence of literature.