A Writer’s Life

last updated 8 January 2015

In 1995, Gay Talese missed the deadline for a memoir he had been contracted to write three years earlier. In 1999, he was still lost. 'œWhat blocked me, I think, was the imprecision of my persona,' he writes. 'œI had never given much thought to who I was.' Approaching 70, the son of a New Jersey tailor had four major nonfiction best-sellers behind him. College professors called him the father of New Journalism. But Talese's work had always been about other people, never himself. His only way out of the bind, he figured, was to keep chasing stories and let the telling of those stories define him.

Judging from the 400-plus pages he came up with, Talese has had a bad 10 or 12 years, said James F. Sweeney in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In A Writer's Life, he confesses how he obsessed over a New York restaurant before finally being counseled that there was no book in it. He tells us how he obsessed over renowned penis-cleaver Lorena Bobbitt only to have The New Yorker kill his 10,000-word essay on the Bobbitt marriage. He relates how he obsessed over a Chinese soccer player who missed a 1999 World Cup penalty kick, and how he couldn't get his reporting on the incident into print until he wove it together with the restaurant and Bobbitt castoffs in this disappointing hodgepodge. The truth is, A Writer's Life 'œprobably marks the end' of Talese as 'œa major literary figure.' And though that's a sad thought, he's included too many offhand comments about his lunches at Elaine's, his almost-daily tennis workouts, and his 'œsecond house on the Jersey shore' to garner much sympathy.

But for readers 'œwho appreciate literary back roads,' Talese's salvage project offers much to enjoy from page to page, said Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today. Thumbing through it is 'œlike going on a long trip with a great storyteller who doesn't know where he's going.' Along the way, said Adam Kirsch in The New York Sun, you 'œlearn a little' about a lot of curious subjects, from the work habits of old-time piano movers to the state of interracial romance in 1990s Alabama. All the while, Talese 'œknits so skillfully,' you might be slow to notice that there's probably no reporting in it that's less than six years old. But if A Writer's Life feels more improvised and 'œevasive' than we'd expect from this legendary perfectionist, it is still 'œthoroughly entertaining.' It's just too bad that its title promises more.