The three volumes of autobiography written by Tove Ditlevsen were first published in Denmark between 1967 and 1971, but more recently have been issued in the United States and elsewhere as a single book called The Copenhagen Trilogy. It’s easy to see why. The power and emotional impact the memoirs make are so much greater when read back-to-back.

I had no knowledge of Ditlevsen until The New York Times put the trilogy on its list of best books of 2021. She was born in Copenhagen in 1917 into a working class family, and started to write poems as a child. She published nearly thirty books from the late 1930s to her death (from suicide) in the 1970s. The reputation she has had in her native country for decades has now started to spread globally because of the trilogy.

The first volume tells the story of a childhood marked by poverty and loneliness, circumstances only partly relieved by a growing talent for poetry. InYouth, Ditlevsen starts a series of poorly paid dead-end jobs and leaves the family home. As the war begins and the Germans invade Denmark, her writing career is launched, first with occasional poems in obscure magazines, followed by her debut collection and novel. Lovers, husbands, and friends come and go, but the centers of Ditlevsen’s life stay the same – the commitment to writing and her determination to live an unfettered, independent life. It proved along the way to be a life with quite some turmoil and pain. Love affairs, marriages, pregnancies planned and unplanned, break ups and reconciliations.

Ditlevsen writes with a precise, clear, and dispassionate style that is somehow hypnotic. The prose appears almost flat, devoid of flourish and intricacy, but nevertheless propels her story forward, pulling the reader into her experience. It’s an exceptional achievement, this ability to provoke deep engagement in the reader without ever giving up the cool, almost detached perspective she has on her own life. I cannot recall when I last read memoirs of such power and written with such unflinching, unsentimental honesty.