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A Writer's Life

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This is the third time I've written this review, and I feel like Talese himself when he talks about working and reworking a piece and than maybe ends up throwing it away. I think that is part of the key to his book. A writers life is messy, demanding, and often, not fun; it relies on the writers passions, what interests him, and his inborn capacity to often not get it right, not convince or please the reader-he didn't please me in many of the diverse pieces in "A Writers Life"-but then again, sometimes it clicks, as some of the other pieces do. What Talese deserves a lot of credit for is showing, not telling, or talking about the writer at work (he says just a little about that). He makes it clear by not saying it that being a writer is something like being a monk; working with spirit, the spirit of what's motivating him to write and write about what ever. Some of the pieces he's included here were simply uninteresting to me, but the book's like a smorgasbord, full of variety; he made it long enough and worked hard enough at it for it to have that effect, so I skipped and skimmed when I wasn't interested in what he was interested in.
Talese is a prose master; his style, old fashionedly enough, is discursive and inclusive at the same time. He's like a Henry James of non-fiction; unfortunately there's little of James that I have the patience and dedication to read and that's true of some of the pieces here, but I acknowledge that James is a master of fiction, and Talese is a master of non-fiction. A short review of Talese's book in "The New Yorker" ended by saying that it didn't "cohere." I thought about that, agreed for a while, and then disagreed. Although I think it's true that "A Writers Life" often reads like a cut and paste job of a lot of things that Talese wrote but didn't end up getting in print-it took courage to include those, and he could have rested on the laurels of what he has published-my final impression, until I change my mind again, is that the book is a coherent portrait of an incoherent activity, a writer at work. When a writer has a book published, that work may masquerade as something that one knocked off when the truth is it may have taken a decade or more to research write revise, maybe a number of times, and produce as is the case here.

Gay Talese has done a great service for all writers in this wonderful memoir `A Writer's Life'. In this joyfully crafted memoir, the story shares, in a meandering way, perspectives that one of our greatest writers of all time viewed the world and the subject matter he has written about: thru, at times, the eyes and perspective of the underdog and the defeated. The sensitivity explored, when carefully construed, offers insight into the human spirit encompassing the currency and social times of which the subjects Talese writes about experiences.

Readers, and particularly writers, may be inclined to view the whole subject of events and the subjects that cause this world to spin with perhaps a more compassionate view and even a sense of sensitivity for the struggle of those who simply `attempt' to follow their dreams, regardless of the outcome. And it is here, in Talese's attention to the human spirit, as seen and penned by a gifted writer that `A Writer's Life' shines. Many a lessons can be learned.

There are moments when the subject matter of Talese's journey are not of great interest to me, and initially I pushed quickly through the pages, only to find the importance of the previous hurried stories to greater meaning than initially thought. Overall, this is a well done story, one that requires some patience. The reward? A fascinating journey of the art of thinking and writing.

As others have pointed out, this book seems to have been written to tie together numerous unfinished pieces rather than to capture Telese's life. I'm glad the effort ended up the way it did; otherwise, years of his time and numerous entertaining story lines would probably not have found their way into a book. Yes, the book is rather circuitious. No, that does not detract from it nor make it boring. To the contrary, Talese brings seemingly mundane subjects alive. The trials and tribulations of the 63rd St restaurant made for particularly fascinating reading. Makes me want to go there right now and check out the latest culinary attempt.

In his latest (and final?) literary installment, "A Writer's Life" Gay Talese is rather frank about the stuff from which it is woven. While not tarrying over the matter, the master of literary fiction makes it quite clear that some time in the '90s he was pretty late with a book to his publisher.

Later, as we cruise through various and vaguely related topics, borne along by the flow of his mellifluous prose, Talese is again frank and fun enough to offer up his pitches, and the responses of N.Y.C. literary illuminati, such as Tina Brown.

Even with queries referring back to his big,"Honor Thy Father," "Unto the Sons" -bestsellers - the writer is subjected to rejection with such lines as, "At your level, we need a book with a very large sales potential. I don't think this is it."

(An editor named Jonathan Segal)

So it is a writer's life, as the title proclaims, and Talese makes use of the large and copious files he maintained over the years while flailing from subject-to-subject, trying to generate a book that he confesses to having been "blocked" on.

Still cookin', but old enough to have witnessed things rendered ancient history by 24-hour news cycles, Talese deftly ties his times to his failed proposals that included stories about a cursed building that served as a graveyard for expensive restaurants in his Upper East Side neighborhood, the castration case of Lorena Bobbitt, the peculiar historical saga of Selma, Alabama, or the plight of an ill-starred member of the Chinese national womens soccer team.

The author takes you through these projects of his, shedding light thanks to his low-key, but persistent way of gaining access to people, leveraging his writer's celebrity as well as possible, hanging around making observations both detailed and general in nature.

highwayscribery's familiarity with Talese dates back, and is limited, to his reading of "Unto the Sons," which the scribe's dad gave to him. Get it? "Unto to the Sons?" It was a charming and in-depth story focusing upon life in Talese's East Coast, Italian-American family, and their forebears in Calabria, Italy.

The paternal half of the scribe's pedigree traces back to Calabria and so the book was a kind of family tree done with another family, but which provided a good idea regarding this unique province of origin.

The cover jacket of "A Writers Life" features a b&w photo of Talese captured in a thin-lipped half-smile the scribe's old man possesses, and which will one day (too soon) be passed onto the highway scribe.

So, anyway, there is an interest in Talese that propelled highwayscribery through this collection of anecdotes by a man of his times.

Among the interesting and unexpected turns in Talese's life was a stint down in Alabama, where he went to university. Years later, in the heat of the civil rights confrontation in the Deep South, this familiarity netted him a plum assignment covering the famed March on Selma, which led to a rather public and televised bloodletting.

In addition to his eye-witness account of what happened, not only at the fateful "bridge" but elsewhere in town beyond the camera's eye, Talese provides ample coverage of a return trip to gauge the progress between races in Selma. His cautious eyes sees improvements in some places, but subtle retreats elsewhere.

In this section of "A Writer's Life" Talese is at his best, using what he refers to as secondary characters to render the true portrait of a subject.

Talese is the king of digression, starting with an Italian waiter at Elaine's in New York, telling you about Elaine, about the waiter, some about the waiter's father, about the new restaurant the waiter was planning to open, about the waiter's wife's sneaking suspicion the place is cursed (she was right), something about her life, before fishtailing off into a history about the building in which the restaurant was to be lodged.

But we say master because it all works as Talese weaves the impulses and energies of distant and disparate occurrences into one another, seeing chains of events and people affecting one another's lives without wanting or even intending to; oft times never knowing.

Although the writer and the book travel well, "A Writer's Life" has a distinctly New York cast to it. Talese enjoyed fame throughout his career and therefore had access to some of Gotham's tonier haunts and denizens. At time it's got a definite "Vanity Fair" feel to it, a touch of the Dominique Dunne, recounting the names of hoo-hahs at fancy schmanzy eateries, but good for him.

And, in the end, that may say something about the change in publishing and what the market deemed doable in this particular writer's life.

The title of this book gave me the idea that it was some kind of memoir or autobiography and it looked interesting. However, it quickly became apparent that Talese had decided to rummage through his old notebooks and files and inflict bits that he may not have used in his earlier books on the reader.

He bombards us with trivia about his office, the kind of paper he writes on, the computers he owns and even where he used to park his car in New York. He goes off on long verbal rambles describing people and incidents but failing to explain their significance. Reading this collection is like being buttonholed by a stranger who has no idea that he is boring you stiff and feels you are interested in anything and everything he says.

At times, he comes over as almost weird. The book starts with him watching the women's world cup soccer final in 1999 between China and the US which was settled by a penalty shoot out. The US won when a Chinese player missed her shot and Talese wanted to write a story about her. No magazine was interested but he made a number of trips to China to track her down and get her side of the story. Since she did not speak English and he could not get a proper interpreter you can't help but wonder what was going on. He devotes chapters to this baffling episode.

He also devoted years to trying to write something on the famous case of John Bobbit whose wife cut off his penis as he slept after an argument. He is obsessed about a building in New York and describes how it has developed over the last century including a case-by-case account of 10 restaurants which opened and closed over a 20-year period. Again we have reams of material going nowhere.

There actually are some interesting parts amidst this ragbag and Talese comes over as quite an agreeable character who does not try to hide his faults and failures but the book should have been slashed in half and the material presented in a more organized way.

Take my advice and give it a miss.

Admittedly, a newcomer to the writings of Gay Talese, I engaged his most contemporary work to judge his great literary reputation for myself and I was not disappointed. I found that the former New York Times columnist is indeed a formidable writer, one that seamlessly and lucidly describes and observes diverse and far reaching topics while enjoying a huge talent for chronicling these observations. This work, written in 2006, encompassed a period where he had reached a literary creative block...on the hook for a new book, Talese instead decided to use the vast amount of unpublished research on varying topics that he'd accrued over time to write a book integrating these subjects all the while extolling the writer's need for motivation and challenge. A Writer's Life was the result and it puts a simple but elegant slant on the demands of a top author that has, as I've discovered, been Talese's demon for all his literary life.

The trick for any writer, and one in which he/she is ultimately measured, is his ability to take virtually any topic and write it in such a way as to be interesting and literary. I'm not sure that many authors can tackle topics such as New York City architecture, restaurants, civil rights and a horrendous crime that becomes nationally scrutinized (John and Lorena Bobbitt) and deliver them in as smooth a narrative flow as well as Talese. His writing is explanatory and well researched while having a fluidity and attention to nuance that expands these topics while making the transition from one to the next seem effortless. On top of all this, Talese, in this work, writes damn good history...his coverage, now and then, of the civil rights movement from the crucible of turmoil (Selma, Alabama), portrays this saga from a unique perspective and, in my opinion, offers a fresh look at an oft covered topic.

Judged by others to be a sub-par effort, "A Writer's Life", to me, exposes the mastering of the written word that Gay Talese has learned over time. I certainly plan to read his other acknowledged "masterpiece" works (The Kingdom and the Power, The Bridge, Thy Neighbor's Wife...etc) and some of his more famous magazine essays (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio...) but I'll wager that the literary experience will be the same...marveling at a significant writer at the top of his game.

I had trouble reading this book. I didn't finish it. It seems plodding and takes forever to get to the point. Lots of long long run-on sentences. There were entire paragraphs that were one sentence long! My attention span is not that long. I admit I'm no intellectual, maybe that's the problem. I read his Brooklyn Bridge book and enjoyed that very much.

Gay Talese is obsessed with restaurants and procrastination. This book is a pastiche of articles he's never managed to write and thoughts he's never been able to previously tell. In a sense, Talese is a failure for never getting the four main stories of this book (the history of race relations in Selma, Alabama; the Lorena Bobbitt case; Ying Liu's missed penalty kick for China in the 1999 Women's World Cup; and the story of ten failed restaurants at a certain upper east-side locale) published as long magazine articles. In another sense, however, Talese must be praised for fusing four unrelated stories into a whole (five if you count the autobiographical narrative). Every so often Talese drops a reference that links his stories, and shows what they have (roughly) in common. This is how the book is structured. Here and there Talese mentions how he organized an article or what he was thinking about while he was performing an interview. Other than these brief glimpses into his mind as a writer, we don't learn many details about the craft of writing. What we do get is a broad persepctive on what it was like to live the "life of a writer" over the past 20+ years, as Talese has followed these stories -- past publication deadlines, through New Yorker magazine rejections, and finally to this (overdue) book. we don't learn much about Talese's pieces that have actually been published. Once or twice he mentions a previously published article, but, for the most part, the book doesn't talk about technique or methods he had successfully employed for past successful articles. (Here I'm thinking it would have been nice for him to briefly describe the comings and goings in his mind while he was writing some of the long articles forwhich he is famous, namely "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" and others.)

Overall, a good book. If your a fan of Talese, this is a must-read.

I listened to Arthur Morey (very engagingly) read this book on CD while I commuted by car or bicycle, ran or just walked the dog. It's that kind of book and no more. Your mind can wander and pick up the thread in no time. Talese is an interesting, shrewd, charming, moderately wise and becomingly modest man in his early seventies. I doubt that Nan Talese--his tough-minded editorial wife--approved the needless repetitions and the loose organization. Yet the reader comes to appreciate how Talese was able to approach and ultimately master the more disciplined works of his earlier years about the New York Times, where he once was a reporter, or the Mafia. Anyone considering free-lance journalism as a profession should read this book. Talese is no genius, but he has proven over time that he has what it takes.

Writers write and all others make excuses is the old maxim of the literary world. In his book A Writer's Life, Gay Talese approaches to sharing the secrets of his craft by sharing an autobiographer sketch of his evolution as a writer.
From his early days as a student at the University of Alabama, Talese has taken a studious approach to writing.
In this book, he shares his style and how he is deliberate in explaining the components of his stories.
Insightful parts include the chapters of his research and writings on the Loren Bobbit case where she sliced her husband's penis off. He paints a vivid portrait of the trail, the reattachment, and motives.