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Gore Vidal

Palimpsest: A Memoir Paperback – September 1, 1996

by Gore Vidal (Author)

4.4 194 ratings

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This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal's compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author's celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters—including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Print length

480 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Books
Publication date

September 1, 1996
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

5.5 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches
ISBN-10

9780140260892
ISBN-13

978-0140260892
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Gore Vidal
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Vidal's account of his first 39 years includes his reminiscences of a host of prominent political and cultural figures.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was born Eugene Luther Vidal, later adopting the surname of his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore, as his first name. Well known as a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, and a social and political commentator, he was the author of numerous novels—the first, Williwaw, written when he was twenty-one—as well as scripts for film, television and the stage, including the extremely successful The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet. His other novels include Myra Breckenridge (1968), as well as thehistorical novels in the series Narratives of Empire, which includes Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000). He won the National Book Award in 1993 for his book of essays, United States: Essays (1952–1992).

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0140260897
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; First Edition (September 1, 1996)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780140260892
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140260892
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,714,224 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,751 in LGBTQ+ Demographic Studies
- #13,577 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies
- #49,051 in Memoirs (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 194 ratings

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Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

194 global ratings

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Danae Savitri

Ah, Gore, How I Love Thee

Reviewed in the United States on January 25, 2008

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Yes, he can be considered an acquired taste. Yes, people have been known to love to hate him. Nonetheless, I found this book to be the equivalent of leaning back against a mossy riverbank, slightly inebriated, the sun burning orange against your lids, your empty martini glass beside you, as you hazily feel a peculiar sense of well-being whilst half-heartedly listening to your friends' chatter from the garden chairs in the back of your estate on the Hudson. You know, your gloriously talented, monied, witty, tenderly human, deliciously flawed friends who are the shining lights of the arts, politics, and "society"(old use of the word). In short, the usual yummy, witty, and erudite set of characters and anecdotes comprising G.V.'s rich and eventful life. As an additional, totally unexpected surprise, he also gives us a beautiful and mockery-free account of his first love. May not be for the sensibility of everyone, but I gulped the book down like a caviar blini with sour cream at the old Russian Tearoom. Dear Gore, he is getting up there in years and I don't know how much longer we'll have him with us, enraging and delighting us lesser mortals, but I, for one, fully expect to dress in deep mourning when he finally chooses to move on.

6 people found this helpful

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VT

Singular man, singular memoir. Incredibly interesting, devastatingly funny.

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2017

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READ THIS BOOK.
If you're interested in the big view of what happened in 20th century America, Gore Vidal had a singular perspective that spanned more worlds than perhaps any other individual in the century. Palimpsest is him at his witty, vindictive, elegant, catty, erudite, expansive, generous, self-involved finest. His first-hand perspective on the Kennedy Bros (JFK, RFK), growing up with Jackie O; his complicated friendships with titans of 20th century American art (Bernstein, Nureyev, Kerouac, Tennessee Williams), his vast spite and emnity for others (Capote, Anais Nin), his central involvement in the golden age of American cinema, and his place in the grand experiment of American democracy (first openly gay congressional candidate).

And if you don't care about all that, but you want to read a funny, scathing, bitchy (can i say that in an amazon review??) book full of one-line zingers that make you want to chuckle and guffaw and let out a DAYYUM GIRL YOU GOT SCHOOLED, then that's a good enough reason to read this.

31 people found this helpful

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porkchop

For those of you who keep a diary...

Reviewed in the United States on October 19, 2007

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...have you ever had the experience of looking back at what you wrote and practically cringing at your own attempts to dissemble? This book reads that way. You feel held at arms length; the narrator is cool and distant, yet you feel so close to him it's almost uncomfortable.

There's an interesting tension between shielding your soul from people while at the same time longing for them to know every single thing about you -- what do you mean, your "fax machine has become a time machine." What are you talking about?? You don't need to make excuses to talk about your high school sweetheart; we were *hoping* you would.

Anyway, the events of this book were not very exciting to me, but Vidal's explanation of himself is really something. He does things most memoirists can't. It's very good.

6 people found this helpful

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Steven R. Wallace

An egoist on his best behavior

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2021

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Vidal took full advantage of his notoriety and his acquaintance with the rich and famous. He hangs it all out in this memoir.

Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2013

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I usually have a lot of self awareness but I don't know exactly why I find this book so disturbing. Was it the lack of humility, the bad mouthing of so many others including his mother, who was clearly very ill and needed a lot of empathy, the rationalizing of expediency (in his own case, not of others)? At least according to him he has few faults and had few bad things happen to him (Yes, he had a difficult mother but he had terrific grandparents--I very much doubt that he had ever been physically disciplined).
A very interesting combination of factors came together to help make Gore the success he was since there are people similar to him teaching at every university who are unknowns. Not least among them, which he appears to give short shrift to, is that he was able to get on television when it was a new medium and many more famous at the time people disliked or were suspicious of it. His charmed circle of connections that he was born into was also a major factor. In addition like many other famous gay writers and entertainers (and let's face it that was a lot of what he was; an entertainer) he seemed to have a knack of knowing what the more intelligent chattering class public would want. His exceptional handsomness is not inconsequential to his success either. Maybe I'm just envious.

4 people found this helpful

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Jeanne Yocum

Started out a fan; ended up not a fan

Reviewed in the United States on August 11, 2021

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This is the first -- and I hope the last -- memoir I've read where I was a big fan of the author when I started and could barely stand him by the time I finished. This book is all over the place. It's not that there's nothing good in it, but the good parts are overwhelmed by the parts that were clearly written for the sake of revenge or that show an amazing lack of self-awareness or duplicity. If I hadn't been reading this book for a book group, it is unlikely I would have bothered to finish it.

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Yoma

Literary and historical candy!

Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2020

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Vidal. So educated, cultured, connected. So at times flat out snarky. Behind the scenes with the Kennedys, Hollywood big wigs, foreign service diplomats, authors, on and on. Going places the reader would never have had access. Often his bottom line on things dryly hilarious.. Loved it. Will pass on to good friend. Too good to be left on the shelf

5 people found this helpful

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william m dickey

Huh?

Reviewed in the United States on November 24, 2021

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I was completely satisfied

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buyer

Instructive, witty, funny

Reviewed in Spain on January 4, 2021

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How to review a long period of American political and intellectual life (and lives), with a highly critical perspective, without necessarily boring

Mr. D. James

He Knew Everyone ... who matters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 19, 2012

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Gore Vidal, Palimpsest
Vidal’s rambling gossipy memoir, while not exactly compulsive reading is rarely dull. The title prefigures the author’s method, which is one of statement, often followed by correction or withdrawal. This is appropriate since many of the anecdotes about the rich and famous are based on hearsay, the slander and lies that we all love and to and the impossibility of knowing the truth. Above all Vidal enjoys a good story, one that exposes human folly and hypocrisy, especially if his victim is a public figure, like, say, John F Kennedy or his brother Bobby, neither of whom emerge from this narrative with much credit. Vidal is always the cynical observer of the literary or political scene, forever wielding the satirist’s knife. Seemingly careless of what others think of him, Vidal begins by dissecting his close family and ends by taking a swipe at almost any man of reputation, including diverse eminences like Churchill, EM Forster and ‘little’ Martin Amis. And that’s just the British ones. The Americans, such as Eisenhower, Frank Capra or Truman Capote are exposed as shysters, hypocrites or weasels. Vidal is not out to make friends.

Yet surprisingly he does. Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, all at times exposed to Gore’s moral scrutiny, and none of whom is let off lightly, are typically seen affectionately and treated with a degree of perhaps grudging respect. Old friends visit him in Paris or Italy, for obviously even as a self-proclaimed recluse he remained, with his acerbic nature, a witty conversationalist and basically an honest man, and one who will give no quarter. What Vidal has, and, it seems from this memoir, what most others lack is a sense of self-respect. Although he achieved a modicum of both, he is not desperate for money or fame.

The topic of money, how acquired, coveted and used obsesses Vidal. Thus, he tells us that his half-sister Jackie ‘loved money even more than publicity and her life was dedicated to acquiring it through marriage, just as her mother had done before her and my mother before her mother.’ Recalling a conversation he’d had with Jack Kennedy about the ‘golden ambience’ of childhood in pre-war Merrywood, ‘I said that much of the atmosphere – ambience – had to do with the fact that each of us had a mother who had married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, Jr., for his money. Jack seemed startled at my bluntness and muttered something about “security,” but Jackie agreed.’ And finally, the explanation for his underlying sense of injustice: ‘Jackie, Lee and I, were brought up in a wealthy manner and yet were penniless, unlike the first gentleman’s [Auchincloss’s] children. Of necessity, Jackie married twice for money, with splendid results. Lee married twice, far less splendidly. I went to work.’

For which the reader should be grateful, for Vidal became not merely a political columnist, but an actor, playwright, scriptwriter and novelist. He is also a social pariah whom the establishment loved to hate, pillorying him for his so-called communism and his homosexuality, the second of which he flaunted with aplomb. While not everyone will agree with him that the novel is dead and society doomed, for his advocacy of freedom of speech, non-interference in private life and as an antagonist of America’s reckless military campaigns, for these alone Gore Vidal deserves our thanks.

8 people found this helpful

Elizabeth Taylor

Where can I buy volume 2?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2004

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This is simply my favourite book of the year. I originally bought it was I saw Gore Vidal on television and I hadn't read one of his books for a while. I must say that I was very suprised after 50 pages as I had expected gossip and human interest but not the real beauty of the novel which is both a description of lost love from a great writer as well as insight into a mind/life of a real intellect. As stated by other reviewers this is not a typical biography in that we meet the young child and have an overview of a life, its more a review of bits and pieces of his life, his musings on his actions and the meaning of his life and of course a chance to meet a lot of famous people. Gore is also not afraid to share the gruesome details such as his step-fathers inability to ''get it up'' or his relationship with his mother which as you can imagine from the fact that he used to vomit when she came into the room at the age of 11 was not a great success. Then of course our leading man also mixed with some of the intellectural, policial and cultural icons of a now past century so it can also be read from a historical perspective as an insight into a close but already lost period of time. I felt quite jealous of him swaning around Europe after the war with Tennesse Williams, or meeting the duke and duchess of windsor or partying around in the world pre-Aids or just hanging out with the kennedys all of whom he describes on a personal rather than political level, and I haven't even mentioned the showbiz cast including Paul Newman &r Marlo Brando. I was also pleasantly suprised to know that although he is an undouted top notch whit and racontour (a dying art) he also shares the same longings as the rest of us and is able to express those in a language which is beyond most of our capabilites. At some stages I honestly just stopped reading to savour the moment or reflect. To be allowed to share those feelings and experiences, to have them so well expressed I found simply a pure pleasure. Please Mr. Vidal, I'd be very interested in Volume 2 (apres his 39th year) where we can meet the modern scarey world of his recent political writings and touch on a rather taboo subject in our ever desperate to be young modern world that of old age.

32 people found this helpful

BillyBob

Gore Vidal never disappoints.

Reviewed in Canada on August 26, 2022

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He was a Cracker Jack writer of both fiction and memoire. He might have been difficult to know and like personally but on the page he shines. I’m a great fan.

RichandTrace

An astonishing life

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2022

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A beautifully written account of the first four decades of Vidal's life. If you enjoy Vidal's novels, this will be fun for you. It is scarcely believable who Gore Vidal knew. Witty and touching, and quite generous to most of the characters.

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Palimpsest: A Memoir Paperback – September 1, 1996

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