Book Review: Talking to Women, Nell Dunn

Book Review of Nell Dunn's Talking to Women (1964)

Read: 02/06 - 26/08/2024

My rating: 4 /5 stars

Book of 2024: 6

In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke to nine of her friends over a bottle of wine about sex, work, money, babies, freedom, and love. 

The novelist Ann Quin says she appears to be a ‘singular girl, singular and single’ but questions the use she makes of her freedom. 

The Pop artist Pauline Boty reveals she married ‘the first man she could talk to freely’ ten days after meeting him. Kathy Collier, who worked with Dunn in a Battersea sweet factory, talks about what it takes to ‘get out’ of a life that isn’t fulfilling. 

Edna O’Brien tells us about a time she inadvertently stole a brown georgette scarf and the lesson she took from it: ‘Morality is not the same thing as abstinence’. 

After more than fifty years out of print, Talking to Women is still as sparkling, honest, profound, funny, and wise as when it was first published.

I bought this book yonks ago at Toppings in Bath (again, I know, I’m sorry). It took me an eternity to read but I was after some female-led reading after a good few months of not. As always with a book of short stories or smaller individual chapters I struggled to keep picking it up since I’d finish an interview and then not have a current story in my head. But I eventually finished it on the flight to Mallorca. 

This book consists of a series of interviews between Nell Dunn and her friends. They’re all from various walks of life, but really the interviews themselves are pretty similar. The women are all fairly similar in opinion, and lifestyle, though there are subtle differences between views on marriage and children. It’s a lot of boring, slightly mundane, hetrosexual conversation (but trust me, most of these women are so trapped in the closet) and I won’t lie, it wasn't the most interesting thing to read. 

I think, at the time, the book would have been more impactful, but reading it now wasn’t so much. I don’t think. It probably didn’t help that it took me so long to read it. It was interesting. 

The lines I underlined: 

Talking to Women was Dunn’s second book, written ‘because I felt so lost, I wanted to know how other people were doing, and most of them were equally lost, really.’ (intro)

PAULINE

They think that if you’ve made a name for yourself in one way or another then you must be more interesting than somebody who hasn’t. (1)

At the moment I can’t conceive of wanting to. But if I did do it, if it happened to me, I would have wanted it to happen. (2)

I think enjoying yourself is terribly important. (3)

One of my things is I really like making other people happy (3)

He accepted me intellectually which men find really difficult (5)

For instance you know there are lots of women who are intellectually cleverer than lots of men but it’s difficult for lots of men to ever accept this idea (6)

They just find it slightly embarrassing and you aren’t doing the right thing, you know. (6)

I think most people want you to listen to them. Which I quite like at first, very much, because I love finding out about people. I’m interested about what people have done and how they live, all things like that. (6)

I really feel that love’s terribly important to everybody and I don’t mean romantic love or anything I mean, say, love of things or love of, say, flowers or love of machines or anything like that, you know, generalised sort of love. I think that’s terribly important to people. (7)

I’ve always sort of worshipped women in a funny sort of way. I’ve always thought they were terribly beautiful. (8)

I don’t feel very possessive.

Possessive about your men?

No. I feel, ‘Well, if they really want to go off, well, it’s the best thing.’ (10)

I used to vaguely feel that there was something wrong with me because other girls were feeling much more maternal than I was, but in a way I like to find that I don’t feel particularly maternal. (11)

I haven’t had the feeling of wanting babies.

I wonder if it might suddenly come. 

Well, it might. 

It might never come. (11)

I have never sort of have confidence that people love me. I know people love people at moments you know, and very genuinely - I can’t believe that someone can love someone consistently (12)

I never expect things to last. (12)

I still think that people have a thing that by actually marrying someone you’re saying something that you can’t say in any other way. (13)

Even if it’s going to break up a year later I don’t think it matters all that much because for a while you really said that thing, you know. (13)

For instance if I felt that with someone I think it’s nice to go off for a while or be me for a while and then come back to it and that makes it much more so for me. (14)

I think sex can be as varied as being alive can be as varied. I think it has all the variations of being alive and feeling and things like that. (15)

I think people are extraordinarily guilty about sex, I never have this - I don’t know where it comes from. (15)

Do things happen to you or do you make them happen? (15-16)

But if I’ve been at home for a particularly long time - if you’re painting or anything you can be at home for a long time - to go out becomes terrifying. People are going to look at you on the streets and they’re all terrifying. It’s extraordinary so I just don’t go out. (16)

I mean most Englishmen find it very difficult to express themselves in ways like that and to actually hear it spoken is an extraordinary thing. It’s slightly frightening as well, you know. (18)

I also feel there’s some sort of emotional responsibility, that I’ve got to bother about them. (19)

I don’t want to feel obliged to people. (19)

I mean that if one is living in the world meeting all kinds of situations I sometimes feel that the two alternatives are getting hard or having a nervous breakdown. (19)

I know I put on hard acts an awful lot, I don’t like myself for doing it at all but I find myself in certain situations being all sort of hard and everything almost to cover up the fact that I’m not. (20)

Do you feel you want to be 18 again?

No, I’d hate to be 18 again. I’d really hate it, you know. I like growing older. (21)

If you’re painting, it’s just painting that you’ve done, it’s an object which is somehow set slightly apart from you now that you have done it. (22)

But now it feels unimportant - all these fears are sliding away. (23) 

KATHY

Does it worry you at all what people think of you?

No. (35)

The most important thing I think is for two people to be really happy, with each other, I think that’s the most important thing. If you do find someone you can be really happy with, because you do find even if you haven’t got - as I said before - if you haven’t got anything you find that you can be happy with a person, if you haven’t got two halfpennies really. (40)

But how important do you think sex is in a relationship between people?

I think it’s the most important thing, really. Myself, really. Well, that is the whole point, that is the whole part of it, really. (44)

FRANCES

Scrubbing a floor isn’t so different from sitting down and writing a poem. All my actions are responses to some demand. I’m there to satisfy them. (50)

I think one has to be completely honest insofar as it is possible because you don’t even know what your own motives are half the time, but as far as you can genuinely be honest with the man you love, tell him what you think your needs are. (51)

I want to feel myself a human being first and a woman second. (55)

EDNA

I would love to love the way, you know, it sounds like a terrible word, but effortlessly, the way the sun shines or roses bloom or to give the gift of whatever I had in the way of conversation or love or friendship to someone just totally and not ask. (61)

Money is sex with the rich, they acquire motor cars that purr and ones that don’t purr - I don’t think it makes them free. (63)

I thought our house was awful, was gloomy, but it never occurred to me that the world itself was treacherous and that our house was just a little extension of millions of houses and millions of people. (65)

I don’t think that’s love. It’s very pleasurable and one shouldn’t I suppose stop doing it but love, I think love is sacrifice really and doing something that’s difficult to do, that’s the important thing. I haven’t done that much. (67)

the passion is both the thing happening, the beautiful sort of sexual coming together and the reliving of it over and over again. (68)

I had a relationship where I thought I was in love with someone who I thought I was in love with me and when it sort of - it didn’t end as much as it ceased to go on, which I suppose is a different thing - I think then it was that I really fell in love with the person. But I wasn’t able or I didn’t feel I was justified in telling him - in going ahead and sort of saying ‘I now love you.’ (68)

My having this love for him is of no consequence to him and I must contain it and not lumber him with it. (68-69)

When I knew I loved this person who couldn’t, for one reason or another, receive the love I had to give him, I decided or concluded that I was in a cell and would be in a cell all my life and that everyone is in a cell consumed with need, or longing, or pain or one thing or another, and that the odd time they can come together is really very rare. (69)

I thought friendship, laughter, the sun, the sky, these are the things that endure. (69)

I used to think the other things, that pity, and compassion were the most important things in the world, and kindness, and I still am all for pity and compassion and kindness, but I think survival is the most vital thing in the world and the strongest and finally the most honourable. (70)

History gives us a sense of proportion. Our own little needs dwindle when we see what has gone before. (70)

It is beautiful for this moment and I’m with this man and the moon is round and tomorrow - God knows. (71)

I mean I fall in love and it drags me to hell and then purgatory, and then limbo, and I suffer, but I always know, no matter how in love I am, that I’m going to be in love again, with someone else, sometime in my life. (73)

It seems to me that I have always pursued pain and humiliation, and always emerged as a kind of auditor or surgeon in order to write about it. So I suppose it not only fulfils me, I suppose it is necessary to me and maybe more necessary than the relationships. (74)

That’s my morality. That they shall not bring into the world someone who isn’t wanted, by them, and who certainly isn’t at that moment going to benefit from being alive. (83)

Isn’t it strange that on the whole women are more touched by the external things of women like petticoats or dance shoes or something than by the external things of men? (84)

I think in fact one is only capable of love when one is older. When one is younger, it’s something else. (85)

I live on expectation more than anything else. Of what I could become I used to have hopes of what would happen to me, or that I’d go somewhere beautiful, or someone would touch my thighs or something. I used to have these hopes - I still have a bit - but now I have the hope of becoming a deeper person, of becoming a seasoned person. (85)

The thing that I most live for is not only that I shall, but that the world shall and that we shall go out of life as remarkable human beings. Because we certainly don’t come into life as remarkable human beings. (86)

I sometimes see people who are obviously dead. They’re walking around alive but they’re dead. And ideally, suffering, no matter how great it is or has been ought to open people up to life but in reality certain blows kill people really, they get closed up. (87)

You expect austerity in others. I expect other people to be able to bear things as I feel I have borne things, and that’s hard but it’s also valid. (87)

To go on living I would like to be able to get through all the minutes of the day aware that they were the only ones I have and I had bloody well better make the most of them. (90)

EMMA

I think the only way to keep a man is by being really nice, making a nice home. 

And you should actually knit. How can a man be unfaithful in your hand-knitted jumper? (93)

But why do you think you got married in the first place?

Oh, just to please my mother. (94)

What would your life consist of if you hadn’t had them? 

I don’t know. What it’s going back to now, I suppose. Socialising, just nothing you know. 

But would you like to have a big sunny flat in Chelsea and lots of time and lots of boyfriends, and enough money to live on?

Yes I’d love that. (95)

I really sort of feel that one’s only got one chance to make a decent life and after that one would feel too submerged by nostalgia. (95)

Why should two people because they’re married cut themselves off entirely from other relationships? (95)

That’s what’s so impossible about relationships, people change what they want. (96)

We’ve got no way of knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. (97)

They’ve got completely empty faces, it took me ages to realise what it was - that I used to be disappointed when I looked into their faces. I realise that I just hadn’t got those little subtle lines - they’re just lines, which makes faces more interesting. I need to see faces like this. (100)

Well, I live for the present so much that I had to do the dishes before I left even though I knew I was terribly late because I couldn’t think beyond doing the dishes. (101-102)

That’s a terrible thing about living for the moment because - I can’t remember what I felt like before. So I never feel different. (103)

I sometimes feel it’s because we’re frightened that people - that everybody else is alright and we don’t want to show we’re not alright? (104)

It seems to me that in a way one’s response to beauty is quite a sort of sexual thing. (105)

I don’t understand men at all. I don’t really like men actually. 

I think women are much more fascinating. (106)

I care more that women think a lot of me than men. 

In fact I don’t really care what men think about me at all. But in fact even if I think they are attractive I often say things which I know it would suit them to hear. But really that’s a form of looking down on them because I wouldn’t do this with a woman. It’s really just appeasing them, to keep them in their place or something. (106)

ANTONIA

I don’t think it really matters what’s right and what’s wrong. I think you should just do what you want to do, as long as you’re not going to hurt anyone. (120)

I’m not a lesbian or anything but I just think girls are much more attractive than men. (122)

I find pictures of sexy girls erotic. I find wearing a black bra or something like that very erotic. I like silk pants because I like the feel of them. (122)

I’d just love to sleep with a man and another girl but I never have done. (123)

(Rest in peace Antonia you would have loved Portrait of a Lady on Fire)

When I slept with a lot of people I lost myself. I lost my identity, and I didn’t know where I was. I just wanted to build myself up with somebody else really. (124)

Love matters to me more than anything, so I can’t be entirely independent. I’m bound to be deeply involved with somebody, in order to be happy. (125)

And really I’m so fond of my father although I’ve had a lot to criticise him for. I always regret being very remote from my mother. I’d like to be close to her but I can never understand what I'm not. (128)

One was constantly taught to deny oneself because it was good for your soul or something. I think it’s absolute balls. (134)

SUNA

And has your life got better?

It’s got much better. 

Because it’s fuller?

It is just rather relieving to know more. When you’re very young, when all sensations are new it’s quite alarming, but when you can parallel it with things that went before it’s not so bad. (138)

Do you ever get this thing of wanting to be admired yourself? Rather than loved?

Not any more, now I’m only interested in someone that I want to talk to or whatever it’s all about, before, I always used to be wanting to impress. 

I think the sort of thing about impressing is that it is a kind of protection for oneself. If you can impress people you somehow push them away a bit. (140)

It’s a wonderful thing when the sun suddenly comes in London. It’s really extraordinary - everyone looks entirely different. (144)

I think it just is very much nicer to share the bulk of your life. One wants privacy and everything else but it is just a human need to feel that kind of warm background, a sort of knowledge that the person will be there, or will be there soon. That they’re in your life. (150)

Where do you feel you write from? When you're really enjoying writing, you're in it, what part of you physically do you feel involved? (151)

 I think there is a certain type of person who has always got this kind of itch (152)

One of the things religion tries to do is make out a definite meaning of life, rather than have to make one's own meaning.

Yes, it rather does it for you, doesn't it? I don't believe that. I think one must make one's own meaning. (154)

PADDY

It's very odd how what one sees is integrated by the stage one is at in one's own development.

Yes your attitude is changing gradually, you can't suddenly go back 10 years.

But you're never conscious when you're living. (160)

I find I'm very interested in the process of a couple developing and getting older and like you were saying earlier, about how a relationship can go on developing. Every now and then it's nice to think perhaps this is something for life (164)

Although I think that sex can be a very deep Bond between two people when life seems to be getting them down or even when they seem to be getting on each other's nerves. I think it can be something great but then I don't feel it's any more important than sleeping in somebody's arms, if you see what I mean. I remember that at one time I felt that even sleeping in someone's arms sort of love was flowing between you and building up a relationship even while you were asleep. In fact possibly what I think is that a bad sex relationship would matter, do you see what I mean? (173)

I found that one of the things about writing, it keeps me writing, is that I'm terribly moved by human endeavour, I'm very touched by things that human beings do, I'm amazed, and, as you say, I want to explore really why they do these things, why they do these amazing things. (175)

Either women are put on a pedestal or else they're despised and joked about. (178)

ANN

Habits become useful up to a point but if one allows them and allows objects and allows people to infringe on one's own self then one can become almost static. (185-6) 

What appals me is that our society seems to expect you to have children and that in some way you're wrong if you don't have children. (187)

I'm ambitious in as far as wanting to go on writing and to know that people will read me. (191) 

There are so many aspects of love and loving that even though perhaps someone does love their husband or wife they find something else with someone else. And therefore they will find a progression in themselves through this other person and they will become perhaps a more whole person. And yet they will still love each other. (192-3)

Do you find men are slightly frightened of you being clever and think that you’re cleverer than them?

Oh yes. (194)

I think one relationship might lead to the next - you know, to another relationship - I feel in my own relationships that I progress. That I always seem to gain and this goes back to that I never regret any relationship. There are moments when one does gain and you go towards that in the next relationship. (195) 

In a relationship I have to be taken on all levels - in fact many relationships I've found have just ended because they have not taken that part of me at all - I've not been able to reveal it. (196) 

Passion to me involves communication on all levels, I wouldn't say that passion is just sexual. You can have an intense relationship with a person and this means that you are involved absolutely up to the hilt in every sense of the word. (200) 

But why should one not expect too much? I feel one should expect everything. 

No, I don't think so, I think that's almost asking that - life owes you something. I don't think it does, I think you owe life something. That you put in as much as you gain. (201) 

But some people obviously are destroyed by relationships.

They allow themselves to be, they want this, they like it, it comes round to this thinking what they feel and not really feeling what they feel. (201)

I try and understand and I find that I would like to discuss it and try and find out the wise and wherefores and not feel jealous and resent him or resent the emotion but to try and bring it out into the open and to go around it and inside, and really try and sort it out. One is vulnerable only as far as one allows one to be. (202) 

Do you care about possessions?

Yes, except I recognise that so many people become obsessed by possessions and objects that the possessions take over and they become so obsessed that the place and things that they build up in their existence become more meaningful than their own personalities. In that sense I'm very suspicious and I don't care about them in that way. (204) 

What seems to me remarkably difficult about life is to be able to live or have one's relationships in a sort of fluid space without picking up a whole lot of paraphernalia as one goes along. (204) 

Now that I've sat and read through all of those quotes and typed them out and spoke them out loud to my computer, I feel different about my review. I feel that there was a lot of wisdom in this book, and a lot of interesting conversations. The sort of conversations I'd have with my friends. I didn't exactly enjoy reading this book, I didn't find it exhilarating or overly enticing as I was reading, but looking back at this collection of notes, this collation of quotes, maybe I did. 

I’d recommend this book. I’d probably love to reread it in a few years. I’d love to interview all of my friends like this. I’d love to make a collection of questions to ask anyone to understand them internally. I’d love to write a novel about my friends in our twenties and what we’re doing and how we’re finding life. I’d love to be more creative than I feel I currently am. 

I love women. I love girlhood. I love the way my friends speak to each other. I love the way we hold each other up and we share the spaces we occupy and I love that we love each other. 

Nell Dunn, Talking to Women, 4 stars.