Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 [Paperback]

Leonard Michaels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 10, 2000

Leonard Michaels tells us that he began keeping a journal because he had no one to talk to about his troubled early marriage, which ended in his wife's suicide. In more than thirty years of entries, he has found many things easier to confide to paper than to friends and family. As a culture, we are obsessed with the private lives of others. Yet Time Out of Mind is more than an individual's journals. While charting Michaels's progress over three decades, we gain an understanding of what it means to be a writer. Time Out of Mind, which has been excerpted in The New Yorker, is the carefully crafted yet emotionally raw musings of a tormented, sensitive, and deeply insightful man who has difficulty reconciling himself to the world. Often hilarious, always riveting, and with surprising dramatic intensity, it describes Michaels as friend, lover, husband, and father, and captures the character of the times, beginning in the early sixties, when he was a young writer living in Greenwich Village.

Michaels has been hailed a master of observation, and through his eyes we see the ordinary world alive with new meaning.

A rare invitation into the journals of a writer."Leonard Michaels is a great magician of prose." --April Bernard, New York Newsday

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Widely praised as a novelist (The Men's Club) and writer of short fiction (I Would Have Saved Them If I Could), Michaels, in his private journals, undertakes a relentlessly candid exploration of the labyrinth of self. The central theme of his fictionAsociety's blindness to itselfAresonates through these excerpts. His first wife, Sylvia, committed suicide at age 24 in 1963, a tragedy that, judging from this confessional, left him emotionally numb for years. In minimalist, deadpan prose, he re-creates their Greenwich Village milieu, conjuring a circle of off-kilter urban characters who seem as self-absorbed and neurotic as any Seinfeld coterie. Michaels drifted through two more marriages, both ending in divorce, fathered three children, crisscrossed the country, taught English in upstate New York and at UC-Berkeley and shifted between periods of gregariousness and solitude. He often comments astutely on the inability to express love and on the compromises couples make. Above all, Michaels captures the loneliness and exhilaration of being a writer, which for him means going against the grain, resisting the reigning illusions sustained by advertising, news, politics and the zeitgeist. A seismic register of daily thoughts and observations, this journal sometimes descends into the mundane, but every so often quietly rises to magnificence: "Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any longer." First serial to the New Yorker. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Novelist Michaels (The Men's Club; Sylvia) began keeping a journal in 1961 when he could not confide in anyone else about his troubled first marriage. As the years passed, his journals became a part of his lifeAhe took them wherever he went. What is published here is a portion of those diaries over the years. Through them, the reader gets to know this critically acclaimed writer and the events and people who helped shape his life and art, including the suicide of his first wife and the beginning of his writing career. It is a rare opportunity to peer into one family's life and innermost thoughts. The entries, often humorous, often reflective, always enlightening, are essential reading. Recommended for all libraries.ARon Ratliff, Emporia P.L., KS
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 214 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (July 10, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573228192
• ISBN-13: 978-1573228190
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,465,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A masterpiece in the genre of bit-lit, November 22, 2004

By 

Gooch McCracken (c/o your haunted slab of Velveeta) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 (Paperback)

I wish it had been longer. Leonard's diary is only about 47 billion times better than William Burroughs's diary. This thing is right up there with Kenneth Tynan's diary. And like Tynan, he's something of a sex-obsessive. Here's one of my favorite entries:

"Big dream last night. A man wearing a dark suit sits at a table with me, talking, watching me. Gradually and obliquely he conveys a message that explains my present situation. The message is that I'm dead. As usual I don't focus on the fact, but begin to wander behind it, looking for the real message, and I begin to suppose not that I'm dead but that this is a delicate piece of information and the man wants me to receive it calmly. Not for one moment do I stop with the fact of my death and focus on it. Meanwhile the surrounding life is sensual. Women walk by in shorts and skimpy bathing suits. We're in a tropical cafe."

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Get inside a writer's head and heart, April 18, 2002

By 

Mariel Morison (Antioch, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 (Paperback)

Leonard Michaels' diary is, as they say, a page-turner. He seductively engages the reader in his life and, collaterally, in the lives of his many friends and lovers. As I was reading, I felt like the two of us were having coffee during layover in an airport bar in Minneapolis or Manila, or that we'd been snowbound at a truckstop on Highway 90 out of Bozeman and over boilermakers he was confessing, explaining, justifying his life to me by relating particular events and dissecting the emotions and thoughts leading to and surrounding those events.
I'll confess that I was in Leonard Michaels' writing class, but it was so many years ago that all I can recall about him is this: He was kind and he was cool. The book shows us that, too. Read it.