Becoming a Londoner: A Diary

Covering 20 years of his life, writer and expat Franco-American Plante (his novel The Family was nominated for the National Book Award) writes here his day-to-day thoughts and activities upon his move to London in the mid-1960s, when he was in his early twenties. He enters into a relationship with Nikos, an Athenian exile and poet, one that lasted until Nikos's death in the 1990s. While in London they are befriended by the poet Stephen Spender and, through him, many writers and artists of the previous generation, including W.H. Auden, John Ashberry, Harold Acton, and Francis Bacon. Plante sees his diary as a way to present an account of this period, to see his own life within the context of the world around him, and has succeeded here in re-creating the fascinating milieu of London in the 1960s, a place that was open to artistic possibilities and varying sexual inclinations and where writers and artists could interact and thrive. The reader is privy to Plante's record of the mundane details of the famous and sometimes rich.