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The inner workings of your writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now targets his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The NY Times (The Kingdom and the energy), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons).
How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Listed below are his amateur beginnings on his school newspaper; his professional climb at The NY Times; his desire to create on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recently available interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Listed below are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has discussed over the last fifty years, and a striking go through the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of your Mafia family.
But he is at his most poignant in discussing the ordinary men and women whose stories resulted in his most remarkable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of an individual restaurant location in NY, creating an ethnic mosaic of 1 restaurateur following the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor’s were born. So that he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the earth in its latest manifestation.
In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a remarkable picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that each one folks represents a good one, if the writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.
Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in a single man’s life, and of writing itself.
From the Hardcover edition.
