Word: memoirize
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Angels is the first gay-centered play to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama; the runner-up was the best show of the off-Broadway season, the equally gay and angry memoir of AIDS activist Larry Kramer, The Destiny of Me. A decade ago, the theater establishment collectively winced when its vital self- advertisement to Middle America, the telecast of the Tony Awards, opened with a best-play prize to the flamboyant Harvey Fierstein for Torch Song Trilogy. This year it seems likely that virtually every category may be won by shows with gay elements. Among the other contenders: Lynn...
...years earlier, his elder brother, Geoffrey Wolff, had published his own memoir, The Duke of Deception, a remarkable account of life with their father Arthur Wolff, a loving, brilliant rogue who was a lifelong bankrupt, scamster and confidence man. "A bad man and a good father," Geoffrey wrote after he floated free of the wreckage his father had created. Tobias recalls that he admired Geoffrey's book but that some of the characterizations seemed jarringly out of key. Then his own book came out. It told of their mother's cross-country flight with him, leaving Geoffrey behind with Arthur...
There are lies and damned lies, and then there is memory. Writer Tobias Wolff reflects that "memory becomes an actor on its own. You try to make it tell the truth, and that's the best you can do." He is talking about his 1989 memoir, This Boy's Life, justly praised for the dead-on honesty of its scruffy boyhood self-portrait...
Beyond damned lies and memory, however, there is Hollywood. Each brother sold his memoir to Warner Bros., and by coincidence, the same screenwriter, Robert Getchell, did both scripts. The Duke of Deception is still being sniffed by stars (Richard Gere is mentioned), but This Boy's Life hits the multiplexes this week. Geoffrey is silent about the film, but Tobias answers his phone cheerfully enough...
Inevitably, Tobias says, he was kicked out of Hill for ignorance and bad ) behavior. His memoir ends there, but his life didn't. He went on to serve in Vietnam as an adviser to a Vietnamese regiment in the Delta during the Tet offensive. Then he got a degree at Oxford. He worked for a few months as a reporter at the Washington Post, then quit to invent himself again, this time truthfully, as a fiction writer...