Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Fiercely resistant to authority, Williams spent nearly seven years in solitary confinement and turned to exotic self-help works, including a text on ancient Egyptian philosophy. "I slowly realized I was living a lie," he says. "The respect I cared so much about was based on intimidation, not self-respect. I had been involved in madness." Interviewed in 1993 by author Barbara Cottman Becnel for a history of the Crips and Bloods, Williams asked a favor in return. Becnel carried a videotaped speech by Williams condemning violence to a 1993 gang "summit" in Los Angeles. The audience responded with...
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version." Exhibit A is the author of that gloomy sentence: Frank McCourt, 66, a retired New York City public school teacher who was born in Depression-racked Brooklyn but spent his formative years in the dank slums of Limerick...
Paul Theroux's 20th novel, My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin; 456 pages; $24.95), begins on a decidedly unpropitious note, an Author's Note, in fact, in which Theroux describes his novel as "an imaginary memoir" and goes on to say that "even an imagined life resembles one that was lived; yet in this I was entirely driven by my alter ego's murmur of 'what if?'" Groaning seems a proper response at this point. Oh boy, another self-regarding writer playing solipsistic games for his own amusement. Anything good on the tube...
...character named Paul Theroux moves chronologically, chapter by chapter, through a life that is identical in all external details to the biographical sketches familiar to author Paul Theroux's readers. First comes his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the mid-1960s, followed by a period in Singapore, where he teaches English and begins attracting attention as a promising young novelist. Then comes the long sojourn in London, where, as an American expatriate and the happily married father of two sons, he writes novels (The Family Arsenal, The Mosquito Coast) that firm up his reputation and livelihood...
Robert S. McNamara's blinkered 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, did little to change its author's image as an American Faust who sold his soul to a demon technocracy. The former Secretary of Defense is not likely to have a good 1996 either...