Customer Reviews

Portrait of My Body

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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.

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.

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?