From The Diaries of Dawn Powell, one of my favorite works and the book that, line by line, sounds the most like how I wish I did. She’s sharper than Dorothy Parker and more forgiving, and that takes pounds of something magic.
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January 10: Ferry ride alone. Idea for fourth novel.The Bad Girl. Bad. Novel of Delphine and Mamie. Delphine’s point of view. She and her girl chum on the edge of circuses, dance halls, factories (small town), telephone operators—the naive pagan excitement of the had girl The nice girl of the place and Delphine’s bewildered obsession with her. Both in the end trying to go on stage. Nice girl fails. Delphine succeeds because she—the man explains to the bitter nice girl—has always romanticized herself Bad women are always the romanticists, the sentimentalists to begin with. They are bad but tragic or beautiful to themselves and it is this quality of imagination that makes them artists.
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