by JULIET WATERS

As anyone who’s read Paula Fox’s widely acclaimed memoir Borrowed Finery knows, she’s had a rough life. Her slim, bleak but beautifully written follow up, The Coldest Winter, remembers the year she learned that writing could help her escape the grief of extreme childhood neglect. Leaving behind the dull jobs available to a young woman whose parents never bothered to enroll her in high school, she took off in 1946 for war-torn Europe. After a brief stint as a model for Harper’s Bazaar she managed to get a job as a stringer for a wire service, writing “local colour” stories in a world as grey and harrowing as it would probably ever be.

It’s hard not to consider the different direction Paula Fox’s writing career might have taken had she stayed in Paris instead of returning to the U.S. And though she never expresses regret, the ghost of this other life haunts the last chapters of this memoir. She seems to be effortlessly drawn to brilliant, larger-than-life personalities. In the first chapters, even before she’s set out for Europe, she recalls personal encounters with Paul Robeson and Billie Holliday. When she gets to Europe, within weeks she’s close enough to the action to be a witness to Winston Churchill crumpled in a drunken heap, mascara running down his face. But though she’s offered better opportunities, given the chance, she immediately flees to the post-Holocaust world of Eastern Europe.

Had she stayed in central Europe, it seems inevitable she would have been drawn into the world of American ex-pat writers, and it seems far more probable that this gorgeous intelligent woman would have become a more successful writer, earlier in her career.

Instead, she was 43 before she published her first novel, wrote reasonably well-read, controversial books for older children, and some critically successful novels for adults. Most of them were out of print by the ’90s, however. It wasn’t until 2001, when two of the hottest American writers of that year, Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Lethem, took it upon themselves to argue for a re-appraisal of her writing that she became a literary icon.

Fox’s life seems in many ways to be a steady rhythm of being drawn to the big lights before escaping back into the safety of a greyer world. Not long after returning to the U.S., Fox became pregnant and gave a daughter up for adoption. Reunited much later in life with this daughter, Fox discovered she was grandmother to Courtney Love. Rumour in recent years has claimed that Love’s biological grandfather may in fact be Marlon Brando. So who knows, had she stayed in Paris, her energy might have gone instead into mothering major writers’ love children. Maybe she was best to live most of her life in relative obscurity.

In some ways, The Coldest Winter is a great introduction to Fox’s writing. An easily read short book about her first year as a writer seems the perfect form to attract new generations of readers. Some critics have argued, however, that the book depends on previous knowledge of her life and work to be appreciated.

True, the book is subtle and extremely restrained, compared to writers’ coming-of-age bacchanalian classics like On the Road. It helps to know something of the mind registering these fleeting, ghostly impressions. But what rings strong and true throughout this book is the need to get outside one’s own self and one’s own grief if one has any hope of growing. What could be Paula Fox’s last book (she’s in her mid 80s, though reportedly very healthy) may be the book that should be read first. This commitment to detaching from her past, and to immersing herself in situations that forced her to empathize with others’ grief explains far more about her writing than her actual past. This is a beautiful book, full of both pain and transcendence. It works as both memoir and anti-memoir in one perfect wintry breath.

The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe by Paula Fox, Henry Holt, hc, 133pp, $23.95