Darryl Pinckney's 'Come Back in September' revisits a formative friendship with the formidable, complicated 20th century writer Elizabeth Hardwick.
With ‘A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick,’ Cathy Curtis brings out the first biography of the influential author, critic and editor.In 2019, the writer Saskia Hamilton published “The Dolphin Letters,” which chronicles the pain inflicted by Lowell when he used Hardwick’s letters about the breakup of their marriage in his collection “The Dolphin.
,” Pinckney’s portrait is exhaustive and exhausting. Even the most avid literary rubberneckers on all manner of topics — the New York Review of Books; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Susan Sontag; Barbara Epstein; gay life in New York in the ’70s and ’80s; the delights and burns of the relationship between mentor and mentee — will be worn out by the detail and sprawl of Pinckney’s memories.
Pinckney is a sly writer, with the impressionistic brush of a poet but the dedication of a historian. He gets his own one-liners in there too. It is a memoir of his own life, his development as a writer and his coming of age as a Black, gay man.