Published in 2010 (first published 1973)
234 pages
Iris Owens (née Klein) (1929–2008) was born and raised in Brooklyn, the daughter of a professional gambler. She attended Brooklyn College, was briefly married, and then moved to Paris, where she fell in with Alexander Trocchi, the editor of the legendary avant-garde journal Merlin and a notorious heroin addict. Owens supported herself by producing pornography, or DBs as she referred to Dirty Books, (under the name of Harriet Daimler) for Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press. She also married an Iranian prince. Resettled in NYC, Owens wrote After Claude (1973). A second novel, Hope Diamond Refuses, loosely based on her second marriage, was published in 1984.
What is this book about?
Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. She will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Once moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Girlfriends patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives. In a surprise twist, she finds a savior at New York’s Chelsea Hotel.
