Portrait of My Body [Paperback]

Phillip Lopate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 1997

Phillip Lopate's richest and most ambitious book  yet--the final volume of a trilogy that began with  Bachelorhood and Against  Joie de Vivre--Portrait of My  Body is a powerful memoir in the form of  interconnected personal essays. One of America's  foremost essayists, who helped focus attention on  the form in his acclaimed anthology The  Art of the Personal Essay, Lopate  demonstrates here just how far a writer can go in the  direction of honesty and risk  taking.



In thirteen essays, Lopate explores the  resources and limits of the self, its many disguises,  excuses, and unmaskings, with his characteristic  wry humor and insight. From the title essay, a  hilarious physical self-exam, to the haunting  portrait of his ex-colleague Donald Barthelme, to the  bittersweet account of his long-delayed surrender  to marriage, "On Leaving Bachelorhood,"  Lopate wrestles with finding the proper balance  between detachment and empathy, doubt and  conviction. In other essays, he celebrates his love of  film and city life, and reflects on his religious  identity as a Jew. A wrenchingly vivid,  unforgettable portrait of the author's eccentric,  solipsistic, aged father, a self-proclaimed failure, is  the centerpiece of a suite of essays about  father-figures and resisted mentors. The book ends with  the author's own introduction to fatherhood, as  witness to the birth of his daughter.  



A book that will engage readers with its  conversational eloquence, skeptical intelligence,  candor, and mischief, Portrait of My  Body is a captivating work of literary  nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"If one is at all refined, unique, idiosyncratic, then finding a companion to match one's temperament, interests, and amatory tastes is not an easy matter, whether one is man or woman, gay or straight," writes Philip Lopate in the essay "On Leaving Bachelorhood," as he attempts to explain why he remained single for 21 years before embarking on a second marriage. The same may be true for authors trying to find readers. In the introduction to Portrait of My Body he acknowledges that "In first-person writing, there is a thin line between the charming and the insufferable." In these 13 essays, Lopate definitely treads that thin line. Although he flirts shamelessly with insufferable, in the end he just manages to fall on the side of charming. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran essayist Lopate (Bachelorhood) is known as a deft and honest delver into the self, and most of the 13 essays in this collection display those virtues. A remembrance of his former colleague, Donald Barthelme, whose "physical solidity" contrasted with his writing's "filigreed drollness," leads Lopate to worry about the unbridged distances in their friendship. Lopate acknowledges that his insecure writer's ego once precluded acceptance of mentors; now, in middle age, he can write feelingly about his closemouthed, melancholy father and affectionately about his friend, the late critic Anatole Broyard. While some efforts that stray from the familial are ephemeral (e.g., on "shushing" at theaters), this Jew's qualms at the brook-no-questions cultural rhetoric of the Holocaust are thought-provoking. But the book's most satisfying chapters reveal Lopate, the longtime bachelor, settling into domesticity. He finds himself musing, more fondly than ever, on an ex-lover with whom his relationship equalized after they parted and then reflects on the delighted surprise of finally finding his partner for life. With the wryly analytical eye that permits distance, he goes on to describe his "unwilling empathy" when attending his daughter's birth.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (September 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385483775
• ISBN-13: 978-0385483773
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #922,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's Essayist Laureate scores, August 17, 2003

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Portrait of My Body (Paperback)

To read anything by Philip Lopate is a privilege. To sit at his feet in a seminar is an honor. I had that experience at a writing conference in Santa Fe about 4 years ago, and it was a very powerful catalyst to my own writing career. The man is a consummate teacher, wise, witty, and wonderful.
So is this book. A collection of 13 essays, Portrait of My Body is an honest delving into the depths of `self.' Read it for many reasons. Read it to learn more about Lopate himself, and in the process you will learn more about yourself. Read it to learn a subtle but strong lesson on the craft of writing the personal essay. Read it to learn a contrarian Jew's take on the "Holocaust rhetoric." Read it most of all to get a peek into long-time and avowed bachelor Lopate's wry and sweetly resigned dive into marriage and fatherhood.
Whatever. Just read it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars NOT A SOUR NOTE, November 2, 2007

By 

ToughButFair - See all my reviews

This review is from: Portrait of My Body (Paperback)

I've read almost nothing but memoirs in recent years and have been moved on some level by most of them, so it wasn't just the humanity and candor that got to me, reading Phillip Lopate's "Portrait of My Body." The quality of Lopate's writing reminded me of what true literature sounds like: lines to linger on, just for the music. His portraits of self, people and places he's loved are affectionate but unsparing (his ode to his father, for example, is a masterpiece of balance). It's not the most emotionally turbulent batch of confessions on the shelves: people die of natural causes, fall from grace without bleeding on everything... but personal truth is always a sensation when it's this authentic and sublime.

4.0 out of 5 stars Appreciating the Personal Essay, March 3, 2009

By 

Peter Weissman - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Portrait of My Body (Paperback)

I liked Lopate's Against Joie de Vivre enough to purchase Portrait of My Body a few weeks later. Again, Lopate delves into himself and presents his findings with self-deprecation, where warranted, and assertion, even indignance, when it's called for. It's a pleasure to find someone who expresses himself so well and with such uncommon sense.

If his essays have a flaw, it's in his overaffection for the past. Lopate knows this aspect of himself, and says as much: the desire to dwell in rich remembrance of certain times and places; an inclination I share with him. At times it waylays his clear-eyed observations, and perhaps his editorial judgment, as in his clunker in Joi de Vivre: an overlong essay on Houston, Lopate's adopted city.

In this book, I found it influenced his portrait of the West Village, a place I know too, and in a similar manner: Lopate lived on Bank Street, and I was around the corner on Perry, at roughly the same time, both of us looking back at the past while there. Contemplating those narrow, old-fashioned streets, recalling his bohemian friends and acquaintances, nostalgia nudges enough of Lopate's acuity aside so that his piece settles too much on two literary characters he knew, who serve as personifications of the place; always a tricky gambit, and one that didn't work for me here.

Then again, perhaps it's because Lopate's highs are so high that they call attention to the pieces that fall short. And in this book, what he has to say about the contemporary Jewish attitude toward the concentration camps--the Holocaust, as it's all but universally called now, a "superlative" that he critically examines--sums up and goes beyond the arguments a Jew hears at Passover, or whenever the state of Israel comes up in conversation. After reading it, I had the notion of making copies and carrying them around with me in case I found myself among relatives, so I wouldn't have to waste my breath, as usual, but just hand out Lopate's essay like a pamphlet.I Think, Therefore Who Am I?