Word: memoirs
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...that fine balance between objectivity and intimacy throughout the book, as he explores Gould's growing torment and his sad decline. Ostwald's abiding concern for his often exasperating friend, whom he was never able to induce to seek therapy, makes this superb psychological study also a poignant personal memoir...
...display your self-regard on the cover of your memoir--a field already crowded with books such as Claudia Schiffer's Memories and almost 20 celebrity bios called My Life? Apparently, the next wave is minimalism, as demonstrated by Whoopi Goldberg's new, boldly titled Book. Some of the genre's classics...
Boyhood is written in the third person, an unusual perspective for a memoir. Unfortunately, this stylistic gimmick doesn't prove as unsettling or provocative as it promises. Boyhood's narrator, unlike those of other third-person memoirs (such as the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Class of 1898), never develops a personality distinct from Coetzee's. The third-person voice just allows Coetzee to avoid intimacy with the reader, to talk around himself without adopting a confessional tone...
...teachers--it's difficult to imagine why the grown-up Coetzee decided to write for a living. We keep expecting some pivotal moment in Boyhood that never arrives, an epiphany in which the adolescent boy realizes he is destined to write. After all, isn't the author of a memoir, especially if he's a distinguished author, supposed to explain how he came to set pen to paper in the first place? The young Coetzee, while fond of books and learning, does not seem particularly driven to his present vocation...
...will he keep them all in his head, all the books, all the people, all the stories? And if he does not remember them, who will?" Why God has chosen the 13-year-old Coetzee as designated rememberer is desparately unclear. It's a lame ending to a memoir that skirts, but never directly probes, the author's inner life...