The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction â€• a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college in the fifties; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the â€œgirl of my dreamsâ€ Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoyâ€™s Complaint. The audiobook concludes surprisingly â€• in true Rothian fashion â€• with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.

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