Word: memoirize
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Most journalists have approached Blair’s new memoir, Burning Down My Masters’ House (New Millennium Press), as they might approach a leper whose sins have rendered him beyond redemption. Blair, who plagiarized and fabricated dozens of stories for The New York Times and subsequently upended the world’s most respected newspaper, is undoubtedly the most hated man in journalism...
...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...
...list of the books that had influenced him. Mostly he went for the heavy hitters--Plutarch, the Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress--but one of his choices sticks out for its total obscurity: James Riley's An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, a memoir by a luckless sea captain who was shipwrecked on the Saharan coast of Africa, where unspeakably horrible things happened to him. Dean King, the author of a biography of Patrick O'Brian (of Master and Commander fame), stumbled on a copy of Riley's memoir and decided to produce a thoroughly...