Caitlin: The Life of Caitlin T

Caitlin Thomas was the Courtney Love of her generation: a creative, charismatic, self-destructive widow whose late husband was equally self-destructive--but ultimately more successful. Thomas herself wasn't entirely untalented, but it's likely no publisher would have given her manuscripts a second look had she not been married to Dylan Thomas. That rankled her, but then again, so did just about everything else. The Caitlin Thomas who emerges here is self-absorbed, self-indulgent and incapable of accepting responsibility for her own actions, which, until she died in July at the age of 80, included chronic promiscuity, four abortions in five years, an astonishing inability to manage money and drunken binges that ended in violence and/or incarceration or institutionalization. Thomas's life was unstable from the get-go; the youngest daughter of a philandering, failed-poet father and a lesbian mother, she spent her life bemoaning what she didn't have. Ferris, who has also written a biography of Dylan Thomas, drew from letters and interviews with Caitlin Thomas and many of her relatives and acquaintances. Acutely sensitive to his subject's faults and charms, he neither excuses nor condemns her. The result is that he has fashioned a compelling read out of what could have been the literary equivalent of a car wreck. (Apr.)