Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen Day 1

“I am always inside it, like in a picture.” A good writer knows how to open well. The first sentence in “Dependency” is superb. Tove places herself in marriage as a doll in a doll’s house.

Dependency is autofiction, and in this photo you see the newlyweds: the young female poet & the gatekeeper. (Tove Ditlevsen and her first husband, Viggo F. Møller (and puppy). Photo credit: Gyldendal’s Archives.)

Tove is stuck between classes, and there’s a lot of resistance towards her "new class," and the intellectual boredom it contains, in this sentence: “I can’t spend my entire youth reading about the French Revolution.”