4 ideas
Ditlevsen, already an established poet, was pregnant and wanted an abortion. She met Carl, a medical doctor, who performed it and injected her with pethidine (Demerol); the injection brought a bliss she had never felt. She left her husband to marry Carl, feigned an earache to get more injections, and spent years in a household where the man she lived with was also the one who controlled her drug, until she was hospitalized and withdrawn from it.
When one person is both the object of intimacy and the source of a drug, the two cravings merge until neither can be told apart. Wanting him and wanting the injection feel like the same longing, so the habit looks like love from the inside. Because the supplier also has the power to withhold, the relationship turns into dependence, manipulation and deceit, with each partner managing the other.
Ditlevsen describes childhood as long and narrow like a coffin, something you cannot get out of on your own. The child's powerlessness is structural: she depends on a mother whose moods she must constantly read. Seen this way, a child's watchfulness and secret inner life are ways of surviving confinement, not personality traits. The ways out are waiting for time to pass and making a hidden refuge, which for her was writing poems in secret.
For a working-class girl whose father said a girl could not become a poet, and who had no money or education, attaching herself to a man was the practical way out of each confinement. Her first marriage, to the much older editor who published her poems, gave her entry into literary life. Later marriages brought ordinary respectability and then the drug. Each husband worked as a door out of the previous situation, and each door opened onto a new dependence.