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Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life

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Sent an advance reader's copy of this book (as a sometimes reviewer, and without knowing the author), I was drawn from the first sentence into this mesmerizing collection of personal accounts, ranging in subject from the author's family to the many failed or else underappreciated artists Greenberg has known in New York. It's written in short chapter-essays, each a self-contained meditation on a central event or personality or passion that Greenberg uses to springboard into other areas that often seem unrelated. The fine connective tissue of the 45-chapter book turns out to be his unbroken, ultimately undaunted desire to cobble together a life from writing, a subtle underlying theme he manages to insert so entertainingly that as soon as you finish one piece you'll want to turn the page and start the next one before you turn out the light and roll over. I didn't read his previous book, HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE, but here Greenberg gives us some of the background to the story he told there, as well as a couple of glimpses into the hazards of finally having a successful literary career after a lifetime of failures, half-starts and disappointments. Largely, the anecdotes are deftly included ancillary notes to the group portrait of a vanishing New York. What Greenberg can squeeze into five or six pages, simply by quick association and spare description, it takes some writers chapters to accomplish. It would make a great model for composition and creative writing students. A man in his 50s, Michael Greenberg has the maturity and the trained eye to use his many experiences and the simple juxtapositions of his ideas to great effect, and a freshness of voice that makes his style almost transparent.

The best review here is the one entitled "A first rate writer but a 'this and that' book." I think it sums up this little book quite well. I would only add this: The marketing hype attempts to portray this book as addressing the issues of being a struggling writer. So for all you struggling writers who think this book will inspire you to 'Keep after it! I succeeded and you can, too!' please move on to something else.

Don't get me wrong--Greenberg is a fine writer, and reading this book for review made me aware of Hurry Down Sunshine, which I look forward to reading one day. But I think the author would have been better served with promotion that states clearly, "This book is a collection of short essays about how complex life with humans can be at times." It is a "writer's life," but it is not at all about his writing life, and for all that, could be Anyman's life.

I loved the essays about Greenberg's writing experiences and some of the observational ones but was less interested in his family or origin and New York stories. The pieces are so short that there was never nearly enough about the topics I liked, and many of entries didn't impact me much. All in all, this didn't detail a writer's life in the way I would have liked since only about 20 percent of it seemed to be about writing. I didn't particularly care for the way the pieces jumped from topic to topic either.

"Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life" can perhaps best be described by what it is not:

- It is not a book about writing--it is a book about a "writer's life," and there's a big difference between the two. Some other reviewers have noted that they were expecting a how-to book or more details about the craft of writing. That's understandable, given the cover image and subtitle.

- It is not a memoir. While Greenberg writes about his own life, many of the stories here are "slice-of-life" looks into the lives of people that the author has met over the years. Including rats.

- It is not drop-dead funny. Greenberg is a much dryer writer than other popular essayists, and, while his writing is occasionally funny, the tone is more akin to Roth or Updike than Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs.

- It is not a "follow-up" or sequel to Greenberg's first book, the memoir "Hurry Down Sunshine."

- It is not simply a bunch of blog posts, although the length of each entry is short enough. The writing is much more polished. It *is* a collection of short, literary essays that the self-described New York Jew Greenberg wrote for the UK's Times Literary Supplement from 2003 to 2009.

It *is* an amazing book that is well worth reading, even if it is difficult to describe. If there's one connecting theme to the stories and the characters, it's New York City--the good, the bad, and the rats. You don't have to be a New Yorker or a writer to enjoy Greenberg's book, but if you're either (or both) then "Beg, Borrow, Steal" is a pleasantly-rewarding read.

Tne cover itself is striking: What appears first to be a white rose is in fact a book or manuscript, wadded up, rolled and dog-eared almost beyond recognition. Perhaps its message is that there is both beauty and suffering in trying to make a living as a writer. The New York Times compares this collection of columns by Michael Greenberg to the work of Dostoyevsky. I can see the similarity: Both authors seem fixated on depressing tales of the disenfranchised and disillusioned in a dehumanizing urban setting. It's hard to read these essays and not feel some of the despair of the characters. In a straightforward, unflinching and unsentimental style, Greenberg descibes his years of barely staying alive, trying to make it as a writer in New York, while taking a series of menial and short-lived jobs. he also introduces us to his demanding and disapproving father, to a Chilean movie director, the author William Herrick, the chef who serves gourmet leftover meals in a soup kitchen, and a variety of city denizens in varying states of alienation. There is a certain degree of wryness and irony in some of these tales, but alas, little real humor, and it's difficult to read more than a few at a time, short as they are. These stories may serve as cautionary tales to the reader, (e.g., don't think you'll get rich by writing, kids!) or they may just be a series of bummers. You decide.

I really wanted to hate this book. I'm a struggling writer myself, and so it's in my nature to hate any writer who's more successful than I am - which would include almost anyone living or dead who has ever taken up a pen. But I also wanted to hate the book because I think the writer is guilty of a certain type of dishonesty that really annoys me: false self-representation as a struggling member of the proletariat. This is akin to Joseph Epstein's constant references to himself as an "autodidact" when in fact he was educated at the University of Chicago and has spent nearly his entire adult life employed in academia. This is akin to Anne Fadiman -- a graduate of Harvard University, an academic, former editor of The American Scholar, and frequent book reviewer -- constantly referring to herself as one of Virginia Woolf's "common readers," when Woolf states specifically that such readers are not critics or scholars nor even very well educated. One might also mention Diablo Cody who likes to pass herself off as some sort of edgy streetwise punk-turned-self-made-celebrity-screenwriter when in fact she's really just plain old upper-crust Brook Busey, raised in the affluent community of Lemont, Illinois, and educated at an exclusive private prep school before going on to earn a degree from the University of Iowa. Greenberg likes to pass himself off as some sort of hard-luck bohemian type from the pages of Jim Carroll's "Basketball Diaries." In his essays he emphasis the seediness of many of his apartments, the low-level jobs he's held, his intimate acquaintance with druggies, conmen, and other social misfits. But for the most part he has been just a tourist in the American underclass, descending into it just long enough to gather enough material for an essay or a story and then returning to the comfort of the upper-middle-class milieu in which he has spent most of his life. He emphasizes the fact that his father was a violent scrap metal dealer, as if to suggest that he grew up in some sort of hard-knocks working-class environment. But his father must have been a financially successful scrap-metal dealer. When Michael was a kid, the Greenbergs lived a few doors down from Sam Levenson, host of a successful CBS comedy program and author of numerous best-selling books. It seems unlikely that Levenson lived in a squalid neighborhood. When Greenberg writes about working as a waiter or a cab driver or a cosmetics salesman, it usually turns out that he held the job for no more than a week or two, and sometimes for only a day, until he was robbed or fired or just moved on. When he visits a soup kitchen for the poor, he goes not because he is downtrodden and hungry but because he is seeking a respite from the lousy restaurants in his neighborhood (or, more likely, material for another column). He talks about the seediness of the writing studio he rents, but how many writers in New York (or anyplace else, for that matter) can afford both an apartment and a writing studio? He writes about losing $5000 on the stock market when he was in his twenties back in the 1970s. But how many struggling twentysomething writers these days have an extra $5000 lying around to blow on stock speculation? And in the 1970s, when Greenberg made his investments, $5000 was serious money. Famous people abound in his life story. He has a book accepted for publication when he is still quite young, something that rarely happens without some sort of insider connections. Thus it seems clear that his forays into the dark and seedy side of New York are just day trips. He is not the rough-and-tumble Bukowski character that he and his publishers have painted him as.
And yet...he is an immensely talented writer. So talented, in fact, that I wish he'd drop his façade as a skid-row insider and tell us more about the true story of his life. What was it really like growing up in an enclave of wealthy New York Jews? What was it like hanging around with the elite of the New York folk music scene in the 1960s and the literati of the 1970s? He brushes past these things on his way to detailing the squalor of yet another run-down apartment building he lived in briefly or some momentary encounter with a New York sewer rat. A lot of the book feels, if not exactly false, then sort of shadowy, as if we are being shown only half of the picture. In one telling essay he writes about false memoirists who appropriate the holocaust for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. He quotes Daniel Mendelsohn, who accuses these false holocaust memoirists of the crime of "plagiarism of other people's trauma." One gets the feeling that Greenberg must sympathize in some way with these people, because he seems to do a bit of trauma plagiarizing himself at times.
Should you buy this book? Absolutely. It is wonderfully written. And not all (or even most) of the essays in it are guilty of falsely suggesting that the artist is a lifelong member of America's underclass. Greenberg writes in sentences that are beautiful without being at all showy. He doesn't strive for pyrotechnics on the page, the way writers like Pynchon or Foster Wallace or Tom Robbins do. He has faith in the power of ordinary words to describe extraordinary people, places, and things. No one will ever accuse him of trying to reinvent the English language. Fortunately, he has no such desire. He can create stupendous effects with just a few pages of plain old American English. And he has an innate gift (don't even try to imitate it; it's something you have to be born with, I guess) of turning a very good essay into a goosebump-raising masterpiece by concluding it with an absolutely magical final line.
I struggled heroically to dislike this book so that I could write a negative review on Amazon that would punish Michael Greenberg for posing as some sort of up-from-the-gutter type who succeeded as a writer only because of pluck and luck. In fact, Greenberg is a child of privilege whose success probably has to do more with his connections in New York's literary world than any other factor. But I cannot in good conscience allow this fact to prevent me from telling you this truth: Michael Greenberg is an immensely talented writer of short personal essays. And this book of his is a masterpiece.

What's that old chestnut about life being stranger than fiction? If you doubt it, you need read no further than these forty-four essays written by a New Yorker in the flesh, Michael Greenberg, between 2003 and 2008.

They are extremely intimate and bare personal tidbits that most would not confess. He started out pretty average. Middle-class, Jewish family in Rockaway, New York, his father a blue collar scrap metal merchant sent his son to a strict, academically demanding Hebrew school. But adolescence kicked in and the fights between father and son "were famous" for their intensity. Ultimately, he dropped out of school at 17, never went to college and broke his parent's hearts.

He wanted to be a writer and as he learned his trade he had to eat and support himself so he, in the New York City tradition, held a wide variety of jobs. He was a Spanish tutor, a street peddler, a waiter, a postal worker and of course a taxi driver. They not only kept body and soul together but they provided fodder for his writings. His life has been anything but boring. Exciting and terrifying at times, but never boring.

A victim of phony friends and con artists, he never gave up. He once sold counterfeit cosmetics in front of a woman's store,after bribing the store's security guard. His price of $3.50 for his products made the women suspicious, so he raised his price to five dollars and sold more. Unfortunately after a particularly good day, he was mugged by three teenagers. They took all his money and merchandise. So it was on to another adventure. And they were many and varied.

He took off to Argentina with his high school sweetheart because "as an aspiring writer, I figured I would do well to experience a place other than New York." They stayed for three tumultuous years. He decided to meet Borges and bravely did so as the later left the National Library. As they conversed, Greenberg inquired about Argentina's deteriorating political maelstrom. "He employed the same words he had once used to describe going blind, `It is like watching a slow sunset.' "

But all was not pleasant philosophical musing. Through no fault of her own his girl friend was arrested and falsely accused of being part of "a revolutionary cell." After several days in a squalid jail where she was nearly killed, Greenberg was able to bribe the local authorities and they fled to Uruguay.

This book is not a tome on how to become a writer. Instead it is a tale of how a man lived his life to the fullest, faced adversity, and kept writing to finally became an insightful, interesting writer.

*************

Dr. Mellander was a university administrator for 15 years and a college president for 20.

"Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life" by Michael Greenberg isn't the kind of book I normally read, but I'm glad I read this one. The book is a collection of short stories, all around eleven to twelve hundred words that capture a snippet of the author's life. Some are sad, some funny, others mundane, but all a part of the life of writer Michael Greenberg.

When I first picked the book, I believed it to be more about the life of writing. Maybe like the ones on my shelf by Stephen King ("On Writing") or David Morrell ("Lessons of a Lifetime of Writing"). It is very different, and focuses more on life. It just happens that the life focused on is Greenberg's who is a writer.

There are forty-some short stories in this collection, which, according to the note to the reader at the beginning of the book, were written for the "Times Literary Supplement" with instructions from the editor to spill a drop of blood with each piece and give them a sense of personal necessity and urgency. I'd say Greenberg accomplished that through sharing moments of his life, along with a cast of characters that include family as well as some that you most likely would only encounter in The Big Apple. Greenberg lives in New York City, and through these stories you glimpse a part of that city than only a native would ever see. For all of us that live outside, we can voyeur a bit through these well-written stories.

The stories are not exciting. This isn't your action movie or television show set in New York. The tales are of real people, real experiences, and like much of real life, common and ordinary. However, the way they are told is interesting, moving, honest, and at times familiar. Again, this book is quite different from my normal reading, but one that I am very glad I picked up. For anyone who enjoys short stories about real life, especially the life of a writer living in New York, this book will be enjoyable. For those looking for something a little different, this book provides a view of life that just may make you think about your own existence and experiences.

Reviewed by Alain Burrese, J.D., author of Hard-Won Wisdom From the School of Hard Knocks.

Michael Greenberg is a writer, one who has suffered the slings and arrows that only those long-suffering writers without big advances, fancy agents and movies made out of their books understand. And he has turned each and every one of his odd jobs --- and even odder experiences --- into a literary memoir called BEG, BORROW, STEAL, chronicling his rise to the higher altitudes of working authorship through equal parts dogged determination and that unquenchable need to record in a native language the many events that make up time on this planet.

Leaving home to make his way in the world as a teen, surviving early fatherhood, working on the street selling faux high fashion accoutrements, exploring Central Park, writing the memoirs (or pretending to) for an aging self-important heiress, Greenberg not only writes (and writes a lot) throughout his life, but manages to turn even the most embarrassing situations into fodder for his lively literary wiles.

That is not to say that if you aren't a writer, you won't be able to connect with the visceral pain of some of Greenberg's unfortunate positions in the world (the great projects that fell apart just at the moment of triumph, especially). His writing is about something very essentially human, the great question of existence in general: if you do something, and no one ever sees it or knows that you did it, does it exist at all? The answer, I think, is yes: the existence of a work of art or art for hire doesn't have to be validated by an audience --- it's just awfully nice when it is. And yet Greenberg keeps writing, working on his own stuff and the work requested by others with the same well-metered prose.

Greenberg's memoirs couldn't be classified as emotionally stunning or particularly disruptive. He has a way with snark, a little bit of annoyance running a vein through his direct and concise language. But the most redeeming quality of BEG, BORROW, STEAL is the inherent sense that art must be made, regardless of your station in life, if you have the wherewithal to create it. Using those artistic leanings for everyday commercial purposes is a mixed bag of horror and comedy, and Greenberg's recollections --- particularly of trying to write someone else's memoirs --- are funny and too honest to be considered anything but true.

With the recent spate of memoirs that people have written and embellished to make their stories as dramatic as possible in order to enhance their original station, it is a relief to read someone's life story and know that it is truly his own. BEG, BORROW, STEAL is that rare memoir that is actually a memoir. Like Frank McCourt or Mary Karr, Greenberg can do nothing more than tell us the truth with the real and tried tools of a storyteller at his disposal. Nice work if you can get it...or make it.

--- Reviewed by Jana Siciliano

This book is not a memoir. Rather it is a collection of short essays, stories and vignettes that were written over the years for a column in the Times Literary Review. While the central character is Michael Greenberg, who is seen as a struggling writer (and later a middling successful writer) a reluctant Jew and an inveterate New Yorker, the time line jumps all over the place. There are stories of his misadventures in Argentina--(where his girlfriend landed in prison),his stay in upstate New York with the second wife, an inside peek at life as a movie script doctor, but these come and go in no particular order.

We learn of Greenberg's father, a scrap metal broker who expected his sons to follow him into the business. But the boy wants to be a writer. Sounds like a younger version of Philip Roth, only without the plotted story line Roth used too provide.

If you happen to be Jewish, a New Yorker and a writer (or any of those three) you will undoubtedly enjoy this book, or at least parts of it. There are many funny moments. For his first book, the publisher sends him for a tour of the West Coast. He is put up at luxurious digs in Laguna but when he does his reading only five customers show up. One of them is reading a children's book and sipping coffee during the whole encounter.


This vignette reminded me of the time I was a guest at the Morris Plains Barnes & Noble. I was to do a talk on my book, New Jersey Day Trips. It was pouring rain and I came just at the appointed time. Although two people seemed to have shown up for my talk, the other three were there for divergent reasons. One couple was simply waiting for their daughter who was over at the children's nook listening to a story. The fifth person had obviously come out of the rain and was waiting politely for the downpour to end. So much for the glory of a book signing at B&N, which so many aspiring writers see as the apogee of bestsellerdom.

Anyway, it's the truthfulness of his tales that make Greenberg's pieces so appealing. If this had been a how-to book for writers, the author would have taken pains to show what one is supposed to do: send out flyers, get on a radio show before the appearance, go over and greet folks. Well, this isn't a how-to book, although the title seems to imply something in that direction. It's more about how to trudge through life while writing about it at the same time.

Greenberg had a daughter who had a mental breakdown at fifteen--and that was the core of his first book--Hurry Down Sunshine. But there is very little mention of her in this volume. He mentions his son Aaron, and we see him at various ages. He mentions the book he wrote about Sally, and the audio he made of the book. But if anyone who read the first book is expecting a sequel--this is not it.

What you do get is glimpses of various worlds. How to make an audio (don't drink coffee, suck a special throat lozenge), how not to wait tables at a fancy restaurant, how credits are decided on movie scripts--there are a lot of insider stories in this book, but these are of the industry as a whole, not of particular celebrities. Writers will find the chapters on screen writing or doctoring screenplays (especially for films that are never filmed) quite interesting.

But it is Greenberg's insights that make this book valuable, especially to writers. For instance he discusses why so many of the relatives, even those who were depicted favorably in his memoir, argued with their portrayal, or felt annoyed. The real reason was the feeling of being used, as if their lives were simply fodder for some writer's pen. I don't remember that particular topic ever being examined before, yet it is something that every writer encounters, even in a minimal way.

All in all, well worth the read.