A Writer's Life (Hardcover)

by Gay Talese (Author)
Key Phrases: thy wife, New York, John Bobbitt, Liu Ying (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
According to Talese, "Writing is often like driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road, and spending a decade in a ditch." Reading his first substantially new publication since 1992's Unto the Sons is like being in the passenger seat of that truck while it's in motion. Talese begins with a World Cup women's match between China and the United States; the game gives him a story idea, which he then abandons for roughly 300 pages for elegant digressions on, among other things, the civil rights demonstrations in Selma, the Lorena Bobbitt controversy and a string of flopped restaurants in an Upper East Side building. Somehow, he also works in a memoir of his early life, including perfectly etched memories of the New York Times newsroom (without directly reflecting on his prominence as one of the first New Journalists). This sort of thing can drag for long stretches unless you're willing to simply follow along as Talese pursues his impulses wherever they lead him. No matter how frustrating it is as memoir, though, this is a near-perfect expression of Talese's inquisitive personality, an inquisitiveness that has led to some of the outstanding journalism of the past few decades. 150,000 first printing. (Apr. 25)
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From The New Yorker
In a culture of success and celebrity, Gay Talese has always found his best subjects in failure and decline: Joe DiMaggio in his lonely eclipse; Joshua Logan in the midst of terrible depressions; Floyd Patterson struggling to express what it is to be knocked flat in front of a filled stadium. Talese's lapidary style and impeccable reporting standards have endured far better than the work of some of his more histrionic New Journalism contemporaries, but he has also known failures: long periods of struggle and silence, abandoned stories and books. Much of his memoir is about frustration and dead ends. When the U.S. women's soccer team defeated the Chinese in a shootout at the Rose Bowl, in 1999, Talese was interested in the young woman who had given up the deciding goal. A natural story for Talese, but he couldn't complete it. This book is a less polished construction than Talese's early profiles or "The Kingdom and the Power," but there is something distinctly moving about his decision to think through the work—and the years—that did not quite cohere.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (April 25, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679410961
• ISBN-13: 978-0679410966
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #615,667 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Writers life can be tough, like this book., May 5, 2006

By	Bartleby (scrivner) "Tough critic" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Wonderful Journey Into The Human Spirit., August 12, 2006

By	Peter Senese "A book is a free ticket to anyw... (Los Angeles, California) - See all my reviews

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.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Captivating...yet not really a memoir, November 5, 2006

By	Vespucci (Memphis, TN) - See all my reviews

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.