Paula Byrne (1) (1967–)

Talk about bringing an idol down off the pedestal; I’ve always joked that Barbara Pym is my patron saint, but oof this was a rough read. I actually knew that the first draft of Pym’s first novel was written in the 1930s and was creepily pro-Nazi (thanks to Laura Shapiro at the Pym conference) and was disturbed then, but wow I definitely didn’t know that she herself visited Germany so many times and was in love with a Nazi too; I mean JFC in the extreme. That was enough, but then there was the entire boy-crazy aspect of her life which was annoying; I not sure if that was more Byrne’s interpretation, or if Pym truly only ever wrote about men in all her diaries.

It all makes one think about what you leave behind too as she wrote to herself along with her novels and stories; the fact that she ripped out and destroyed pages of those diaries is telling, and it’s so interesting to wonder about what was lost. I do ponder still how Byrne decided to tell Pym’s story; this was a crazy long bio for what was generally a fairly ordinary life, but I wish that we actually saw more of that ordinary part which Pym so beautifully writes about in her novels (although perhaps that was the point—the novels were the ordinary part…).… (meer)