/lit/ - Literature

>>19803535
> What does alter ego mean? A character?
Yeah, a character, a second-self. What do you think it means? she's not suffering from multiple-personality disorder if that's what you're wondering about. Her father apparently wanted a boy, and she always wanted to be one since she was a girl, so she invented Eric Avon.
> 'If only she'd been born a boy,' he once lamented in a poem addressed to her. 'My very slender one, so feminine and fair, so fresh and sweet, so full of fun and womanly deceit.'
> Friends noticed that Gerald was constantly tactile with his second daughter.
> 'He couldn't keep his hands off her,' observed one of their neighbours, the tennis star Bunny Austin. 'It was quite embarrassing at times.'
> As she aged, Daphne began to encourage 'inappropriate intimacies' between her father and herself.
> 'We crossed the line,' she admitted to me in 1965, 'and I allowed it. He treated me like all the others, as if I was an actress playing his love interest in one of his plays.'
> [...]
> In her teenage years, Daphne's attitude to her father underwent a sharp change when she became aware of his numerous affairs with young actresses.
> Her reaction was a mixture of jealousy and deep resentment at the humiliation these liaisons caused her mother.
> One of Gerald's many mistresses was the stage star Gertrude Lawrence, to whom Daphne was intensely hostile. 'She hated her,' said Bunny Austin, 'calling her 'that bloody bitch'.'
> In 1932, when Daphne was 25 and Frederick 'Boy' Browning — 'Tommmy' to his family — a 35-year-old major in the Grenadier Guards, came sailing into Fowey Harbour in his boat, Ygdrasil, to claim her as his bride, Gerald broke down and wept. 'It's not fair, it's not fair,' he cried, over and over again.
> Two years later, after Gerald had died at the age of 61 from cancer of the colon, Daphne wrote an astonishingly candid biography of him, revealing her father's vanity, his drinking and his frequent and extreme mood swings, in which his celebrated charm gave way to ugliness and violence.
> At Menabilly, a life-size portrait of Gerald dominated the staircase. Daphne sometimes stood in front of it, gazing up at her father and murmuring gently, 'Oh D! Oh D!' [as she called him 'My Daddy']
> Tommy, ten years her senior, became both her lover and a substitute father figure.

From:
> https://dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-8857119/Daphne-du-Mauriers-disturbing-relationship-father-told-old-friend-MICHAEL-THORNTON.html

Why are writers and actors such strange and perverted people?