I Knew Of A Woman Poem by Jan Oskar Hansen

I knew of a woman

Who wrote a novel that sold 30 thousand copies,
there was a talk of making her novel into a film,
she bought a house.
She wrote several manuscripts they were rejected
and she had to move out of the house.
Her previous occupation was as a cleaner
but who wants a famous char as a house-help?
She changed her name, bought a bike coloured her hair
Auburn and got a job as a cocktail waitress at a dive,
fat sweaty hands were stuffing cash down her bra.
She wrote a novel about it, like going back to
her roots the street life she knew and tried to escape
She was famous again her photo in the paper and in
literary supplements.
She could not run away from her past
moved to a cabin in the deep rural, milking cows
sheep and idyll and wrote a book about betrayal,
it sold well; the intellectuals didn`t know it was about them
and she knew well it was her sordid past
that attracted the jaded middle-class taste
and she had to write, and survive on a diet of disgust
the life she had struggled to break out of