Word: memoirize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Times editors assured staff in a brief memo, “We don’t intend to respond to Jayson or his book.” Elsewhere, visceral contempt for Blair—the sinner and his sins—has clouded most attempts to assess the memoir. And in that sense, Blair’s otherwise-sleazy title rings true. The pain he has inflicted upon journalists is visceral. This heretic has momentarily shattered the house of worship...
...gritty feel of The Paper. “I soon found myself deep in the woods,” he writes, “cutting a path through American and English elms as I walked toward the area where I saw the most police activity.” The memoir even dares to end where it begins, a rhetorical device which ultimately feels like a shameless ploy for movie licensing rights...
...celebrity memoir, of course, is liable to allegations of self-promotion, but Blair’s story permits him one legitimate justification for publishing this nearly 300-page treatise: an apology. Blair does apologize, but he couches the mea culpa in so many excuses that he hardly seems repentant. Among his many rationalizations, Blair blames a hostile environment at the Times and an escalating addiction to cocaine. But readers would have more sympathy for Blair’s latter excuse, at least, if he didn’t seem to take pride in his vices. Responding to an editor...
...nothing but relief,” he writes. “I wrapped the leather around my neck. It felt cold and slightly sticky, but I did not jerk from it. I felt out of my body.” Given the strident title of Blair’s memoir, it’s hard not to view this scene as a potent self-lynching. Indeed, while the veracity of Blair’s account is necessarily dubious, he is still a talented writer: his memoir often succeeds even as fiction...
...while Blair purports to set his narrative in the larger framework of the black experience, as a work of African-American studies, his memoir is largely vapid. Most incredulously, he refers incorrectly to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man three times, adding an article to the title and therefore inadvertently—and inexcusably—alluding to H.G. Wells’ The Invisible...