Author of the week: Stephen Sondheim

last updated 8 January 2015

Stephen Sondheim isn’t about to spill any personal secrets, said Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. Not that the legendary Broadway composer failed to notice the tenor of readers’ complaints about his last book, Finishing the Hat, which was part songbook, part commentary on craft. “The most common of them,” he writes in his follow-up, Look, I Made a Hat, “is that I didn’t speak enough about my personal life, ‘personal’ being the euphemism for ‘intimate,’ which is the euphemism for ‘sexual.’” Fat chance the complainers will ever get the memoir they crave, says Sondheim, now 81. His life, he says, just hasn’t been very interesting. “The shows, maybe. But not me. I’ve had a very placid, privileged life with not a lot of vicissitudes outside of a rather melodramatic mother.”

The new book, which follows Sondheim’s career from 1981 on, again focuses on the process of songwriting, said Malcolm Jones in Newsweek. “I wanted to show people what you go through when writing and rewriting a musical. How you get from A to B,” he says. Producing the books gave Sondheim a chance to re-examine his own work. Though he’s always been self-deprecating, his assessments came out in line with those of most Broadway fans. “A lot of those lyrics are really good,” he says. With volume two done, he’s eager to get away from being an author and return to what he does best. “The books took four years to write,” he says. “I’m glad I did it, but I’ve got to get back to writing music.”