| Description | Gore Vidal refers to this memoir of his first thirty-nine years as a palimpsest ("paper, parchment, etc., prepared for writing on and then wiping out again, like a slate"), pointing out how remembrances are shaped and reshaped with time. Cutting from present day to the past, Vidal tells of his life as a novelist and dramatist, politician and critic; he also discusses the figures he has known: the Kennedys, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Tennessee Williams, Amelia Earhart, Jack Kerouac, Eleanor Roosevelt, André Gide, and many, many others. Member of a political clan, Vidal was born into public life. Here, recalled with the charm and sharp wit of one of the greatest raconteurs of our time, are his school days; his stint in the army overseas during World War II; his experiences as a literary wunderkind in New York, London, Rome, and Paris in the forties and fifties; his campaign for Congress; and various sexual dalliances along the way.
Woven throughout are meditations on writing, history, acting, and politics, and, perhaps most surprisingly, poignant glimpses of his first and greatest love: a boyhood friend killed in the battle of Iwo Jima. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life," Vidal writes, "while an autobiography is history." This memory of a life is, as Martin Amis put it in The Sunday Times (London), "a tremendous read, down and dirty from start to finish. It is also a proud and serious and truthful book ... work of considerable artistry." |
