Too Good to Be True: A Memoir

by Benjamin Anastas

When he was three, in the early 1970s, Benjamin Anastas found himself in his mother’s fringe-therapy group in Massachusetts, a sign around his neck: Too Good to Be True. The phrase haunted him through his life, even as he found the literary acclaim he sought after his 1999 novel, An Underachiever’s Diary, had made the smart set take notice. Too Good to Be True is his deeply moving memoir of fathers and sons, crushing debt and infidelity—and the first, cautious steps taken toward piecing a life back together.

It took a long time for me to admit I had failed, Anastas begins. Broke, his promising literary career evaporated, he’s hounded by debt collectors as he tries to repair a life ripped apart by the spectacular implosion of his marriage, which ended when his pregnant wife left him for another man. Had it all been too good to be true? Anastas’s fierce love for his young son forces him to confront his own childhood, fraught with mental illness and divorce. His father’s disdain for money might have been in line with the ’70s zeitgeist—but what does it mean when you’re dumping change into a Coinstar machine, trying to scrounge enough to buy your son a meal? Charged with rage and despair, humor and hope, this unforgettable book is about losing one’s way and finding it again, and the redemptive power of art.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Ebooks, Relationships, Money, Biography Memoir

208 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2012

Reviews

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A week ago I did my taxes and I ended up owing a fair amount of money. This wasn't a surprise—I unexpectedly did quite a bit of freelancing last year and didn't bother to prepay my taxes on any of it—and I was able to pay it, but still, it stung. To make myself feel better I picked up Too Good to Be True. Sure, I had hated Benjamin Anastas's first novel, but my understanding was that this memoir detailed his major money problems, which I expected would put my own situation into perspective.

I turned out to be right about that—the Anastas of this memoir has a massive amount of debt, so much that many of us would feel pretty good in comparison. But in some ways Anastas's situation was not so terrible: He always managed to scrape by, he always worked writing or writing-adjacent jobs (never stooped to working at Starbucks, for example), and when he fell short, he was in fact supported by his girlfriend, with whom he lived. Indeed, a number of (negative) reviews of this memoir essentially ask: Who cares about this guy and his champagne problems?

I'll tell you who cares: ME. Not because of the money, but because this is a gossipy book about publishing and literary circles in Manhattan, and I am here for that every day of the week. What's more, this memoir has the momentum of a runaway freight train. I easily finished it in two days and I never finish anything in two days anymore. I don't know if I'd recommend this to anyone, but I'm glad I recommended it to myself. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

When Benjamin Anastas tells us that his memoir is about failure, he seems to believe it. He flagellates himself for never replicating the success of his first novel. He howls at his childish decision to cheat on his wife while on a business trip in Europe. He shakes with shame when telling us that he's deep in debt. But as Anastas enumerates his sins, he simultaneously forwards a counter-narrative. He continues to work as a professor and magazine writer. He comes clean to his wife, and he blames her flightiness for the end of their marriage. His debts are small enough that the income from a fact-checking job can pay them down. He is, in his telling, a committed and excellent father and boyfriend. The terrible failure seems more rhetorical than real.

Too Good To Be True is really about the durability of self-delusion. Anastas's poverty is one of fancy Brooklyn restaurants, and Apple products, and adjunct professorships. He seems to be angry at himself mostly for struggling to maintain a bourgeois New York life without accumulating debt. His great humiliation, the moment in which he finally admits defeat and begins his resurrection, comes when he takes a well-paying job that he considers beneath his angry intellect. If Anastas were more self-aware this could have been a great book about the emotional and economic unsustainability of a culture in which everyone thinks he should be a star. As it is, it's a confessional that mostly feels like a long humble brag.

[Moira]

'I was definitely exposed to too much Fitzgerald at an early age. One of the first things I did when I moved to New York after grad school was visit the Scribner building on 5th Avenue and try to summon the ghosts of Fitzgerald and his legendary editor Maxwell Perkins (to no avail).' http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/201...

'What pushes “Too Good to Be True” over the top and makes it more than just a precious lament by a writer who made it much further than most ever will, is Mr. Anastas’s intense and timely writing about money. More specifically, his writing about what it is like to have almost none at all and to be vertiginously in debt.' http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/17/boo...

***

Well well WELL I believe I found The Nominee.

"with the gaze of a rigorous formalist in the tradition of B.S. Johnson, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. (I got that from Wikipedia: nice entry!)"

google: 'william gaddis robert coover alain robbe-grillet'

First hit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...

"His first published novel, Sound on Sound (1995), draws upon innovations pioneered in the work of his father, but also contains echoes of many other modernist and postmodernist writers, including Robert Coover, William Faulkner, William Gaddis, B. S. Johnson, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. A rigorously formal book, it is structured...."

And, "Trance....was named a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction"

And, lessee.....I bet this is the picture -- "Soon after that you posed for a publicity photo in my old bedroom. You know the one. You're standing by the window barefoot. In a T-shirt and jeans. Books everywhere. It's a nice picture. The light is flattering."

ETA "'But the Mets,' you said in your expansive mode, 'are a team strangely inclined to fatalism'...." Yup, that's Sorrentino; it's a straight quote from Believeniks. I mean, unless it's Jonathan Lethem, but I doubt it. Altho Lethem lived in Brooklyn too. Hmmm. The timing doesn't fit for the kid or the not-winning the award, tho.

[Chuck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Suppose that you are a fairly young writer who has attained an enviable degree of success, with a couple of published books and some connections with major literary magazines listed on your CV. But then your life starts falling apart. You go broke, you have an ill-considered affair that -- once confessed -- causes your pregnant wife to have one of her own and leave you; you suffer from writer's block. What will be your Act II?

It's obvious, isn't it? You write about yourself. After all, this is the Facebook Era -- enough about you, let's talk about me. Essentially, that's Benjamin Anastas' approach, except that he manages to secure the benefit of a mainstream publisher rather than Facebook as his literary forum. Granted, Anastas' prose is usually much better than what one finds in amateur online postings, and he manages to edit his story far more astutely than do most contributors to social networking websites. But what he gives us in Too Good to Be True is a mercifully short (175-page) book that doesn't begin to live up to its critical notices and gushing dust-jacket blurbs.

Anastas recounts, rather impressionistically, bits and pieces of his recent life's troubles, his dysfunctional family history, and his initial steps toward recovery. To his credit, he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and he occasionally manages to amuse, but in the end he fails to convey a real sense of affective engagement with his subject (a/k/a himself); the words are there, but a convincing depth of feeling is strangely absent. Maybe that's a defensive strategy without which Anastas wouldn't have been able to face his own story. In any case, the consequence is that the reader -- or at least this one -- is reduced to the position of a clinical spectator who can't bring himself to care very much about either the author or his screwed-up past. If Too Good to Be True were a work of great literary prowess, one might manage to forgive its lack of emotional power. But it isn't, so one can't. Instead, Anastas only demonstrates that a sincere memoir can be true without being good.

[Hannah Meehan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Why can't you give a book no stars, Goodreads? This doesn't deserve any.

I hated this book so much I live-tweeted my hate-reading of it to my friend Lisa. I will let the tweets speak for themselves.


so I am reading "Too Good To Be True" (Benjaman Anastas) and may need you to read and review it. I have... judgmental opinions.

because author is not funny. Also you cannot write about "knowing what it is like to be really broke" and about your iPhone/Mac.

also my good reads review will include how many times, per page, I thought: "Get a job." (Max so far has been 17.)

"I have to go to the coin star with my son to buy coffee and pirates booty, it is humiliating" "NO YOU DON'T!" It's a hate read.

I mean, if you don't have a job why can't you go while kid is at school/with custodial parent?

and how broke can you be if you are still regularly digging up $10-30 in change???

also, why should we feel bad your wife left you for more successful writer when you cheated first?

there is a 4 page recap of a FB thread that made him feel bad. Bc participants (who he didn't even know!) were competent.
and viewed spare change as windfall, not primary income stream. I hate this guy so much.

he is now charging $225 couples therapy sessions. his wife is already living with someone else.

Sometimes he is so broke he can't get lemonade w/his pupusas at the Brooklyn flea

he is too broke to buy his girlfriend a nine---NINE--- carat diamond ring

after he moved to the smallest one bedroom apt he had ever seen he spent $90 on a psychic healer

9 page letter to ex-wife's new partner!

he has $60 credit left on a visa so he can afford to take a cab!

his own life "turned into a story that I didn't choose" except that it was created by his action/inaction

oh thank god 170 pages in and he FINALLY got a temp job. Like I yelled at him to do for previous 169 pages.

[Howard Cincotta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s the thing about literary failure: if it’s real, we would never know. No misses the middling literary novel, or even the masterpiece, that was never written or never published. By definition.

I speak from bitter experience.

Okay, having gotten that off my chest, I can say that Too Good To Be True is as compelling an account of literary, personal, and financial failure as you can read, short of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s celebrated essay, “The Crack-Up,” which author Benjamin Anastas quite deliberately cites.

Anastas’s sins are venal, not mortal, but he pays the price anyway. Writes a novel he doesn’t believe in. Publishes a book that doesn’t meet expectations. Sleeps with someone not his fiancé. Marries fiancé anyway – with predictable consequences. Falls into serious credit-card debt, and in scenes that every reviewer has cited, is reduced to using Coinstar to process enough spare change to feed his son on visitation days.

Whatever his previous literary failures, Anastas is a terrific writer, and many of the scenes of his traumatic childhood and adult crises are as merciless as a scalpel. If you have any interest in the craft of writing or the memoir genre, you will find superlative examples here of how to frame and dramatize the scenes from a life into a compelling narrative.

In the end, Anastas begins to dig himself out of his debt trap, find a new love, and most moving of all, writes a passionate redemptive account of his love for his son.

Bottom line, with this triumphal book and new life, Anastas has achieved literary success after all. Not that I’m bitter.

[Holly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reading this I was reminded of two letters to "Sugar" featured in Tiny Beautiful Things: the one from the young woman who can't move forward because she thinks her student loan debt defines her, and the one from the aspiring writer with the staggering sense of entitlement and the MFA from the prestigious school. (Cheryl Strayed tells the former to stop sniveling, make a budget, get a job, and to remember how fortunate she is; she tells the latter to get over herself.)

I feel kind of hostile towards this book and Mr. Anastas, and I don't really want to feel that way or write about that. But I am not as generous as "Sugar." And it's just unseemly, this memoir. The shockingly narrow-minded obsession with his debts, and his blindness to his sense of entitlement, his less than artful stories about his ex-wife. (The real names of Marina and "The Nominee" are easy to find with a quick online search, as are their responses to this memoir). I have a friends who write seriously and want to publish; they use all available time to read and write and ALSO hold down 40+-hour/week jobs, because they have to pay the bills. They wouldn't appreciate learning that it is demeaning or "embarrassing" to be without a book contract or to be penny-pinching, or to be working-class, or to take the bus instead of a taxi, or to forgo the lattés and the $9,100 engagement ring and the "bed with a headboard," or to live in an affordable city within their means instead of a fashionable Brooklyn neighborhood.

David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest after a breakup. He's (presumably) no DFW, but I wish Anastas had put this material through a crucible and turned it into fiction. I read many memoirs, but sometimes the combination of self-aggrandizing retrospection and bald truth-telling is just something I don't need to know about. (I saw Rachel Cusk's reputedly awful divorce memoir on the shelf at library today, and wisely passed it up.)

[K · Rating 1 out of 5]

blech. What an annoying account of this young man's poor decision to cheat on his wife and then endure the divorce process. If you are broke then get a job for crying out loud. I appreciate the starving writer thing but no one is guaranteed a charmed life as a successful writer. Get down off the cross and get a job. Too broke for a $60 cab ride? Give me a break. A nine page loser-letter to your ex-wife's new love? Seriously? Six pages of edited facebook screen caps? Really, it's not that deep. I skimmed the last third of the book just to see if there would be any change in substance and, no, not really. Sheesh.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book--for its wisdom about money, about heartbreak, about longing--for its honesty. Anastas's poverty may not run quite so deep as those who are truly suffering in this country, but I know many of us will recognize ourselves in his struggles, and in the connections he makes to what we learn in childhood. A beautiful book.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Something of a disappointment. A memoir of a sort of a once-successful author who finds himself entering his 40s divorced, broke, and adrift. I went into it rooting for him, but I can't say the story he tells is particularly insightful or compelling. Anastas is a talented writer, to be sure, but there's not much real effort at self-reflection or self-awareness evidenced in these pages. He confesses to a sin of cheating on his girlfriend (later wife), but everything that follows seems to be the result of others' inexplicable and, it seems to him, inexcusable behavior. Perhaps, but as the book wore on I found myself trusting him less and less. I don't want to dismiss the real anxieties and troubles that he found himself in but he lived to published a book about it, and a dash of humor would have helped. He traces a central source of his problems to the idea that he lived, from his youth onward, a life that was 'too good to be true,' which left him unprepared for rockier times and unaccountable failure, but that phrase reeks of a particular kind of condescension that surfaces here and there throughout this book, a kind of attitude I might have taken if it had been presented with a little more self-deprecation and a bit of a laugh rather than with the utter seriousness on display here.

[Deirdre · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't read a book this compelling in a long time and I read a lot. Writers especially will devour it but I think anyone would love it. I bought this on my kindle after I read the favorable review in The New York Times. I just had a baby a week ago and went back and forth between staring at my son's face and reading this book - was just too compelled to put the book down. The writing is beautiful and just excellent, the story of the author's failed marriage and career drives forward with incredible energy and intelligence, and there is so much heart and soul, especially around his son and his childhood. Really made me want to read more from this author. I am going to buy his first novel and I am also going to buy TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE in hardcover because it's the kind of book I know I will want to reread. Just loved it and can't recommend it highly enough.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've had a mini-obsession with Benjamin Anastas since I read his Lives column in the NYT magazine a year or so ago about having lesbian moms. Unfortunately for me, this memoir does not delve into that part of his life. I enjoyed this book, but it struck me as a bit self-indulgent -- it is really more of a diary, which I guess is just a memoir without the perspective that distance brings. If I want to hear a really smart, generally privileged person complain about hi unpaid bills, I have plenty of friends to choose from. That said, I could certainly relate to one of the book's central themes: that feeling that your life has become a story that you "didn't choose." And some of his observations on parenting are very moving. Time for me to get back to Cloud Atlas! I keep getting side-tracked.

[Julie Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't want to like this book, but I ended up being kind of mesmerized by this guy's writing. I would have given it 3 1/2 stars. Read it for free from the "library," even though early into it I was screaming "Get a job!" inside my head. By the end I was on his side, though I don't think I really like him.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

How many books do we need about immature Brooklyn writers? Probably a few less than there currently are. Not revelatory, kind of pedestrian in the end.

[Larry H · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Most of us open our eyes at some point in our lives and find ourselves in a place we never would have chosen if we'd been paying attention along the way—a region of unlikeness all the more disorienting because we have found it on our own, without anyone else to blame, propelled ourselves right into the maw of it by the force of our own desires."

So says Benjamin Anastas relatively early on in his beautifully written and emotionally affecting memoir, Too Good to Be True. Anastas was an author whose first book, An Underachiever's Diary, received some serious acclaim in the late 1990s, and his follow-up novel helped him achieve renown, a goal of his for quite some time. Yet the pressure of following up these successes with a third novel seemed nearly impossible to handle, and his life began imploding around him.

This book is a first-person account about living with the constant anxiety of financial need, the near-crushing desire to regain your former sense of security and achievement, the powerful love of a father for his young son, and the need to love and be loved. Anastas pulls very few punches in accounting for the events in his life—he doesn't sugarcoat his actions or reactions, or his role when circumstances went bad.

As he recounts his childhood, raised by a hippie father who believed money was the root of all evil and a mother who struggled with mental illness when he was young, you can see how these events shaped the man he has become. You feel the strength of his desire to keep his marriage going even though he and his wife can barely stand one another, you sense his shame and fear about whether or not he'll ever be able to regain his financial footing (or avoid having to take his young son to a Coinstar machine to gather enough cash to pay for food), and you understand his hopefulness that he can give his son the love he needs to thrive.

Too Good to Be True is more than a memoir of self-discovery, it's more a tale of understanding how you get to a certain point in your life, how much of what has happened to you was truly within your control, and where you can go from this point. As someone who has struggled with anxiety about the direction of my own life, I heard Anastas' voice and identified with his feelings, his worries, and his thoughts.

"How much of our lives do we write, and how much of them are written for us?" Benjamin Anastas strives to answer that question, and reading this book, you'll relish how he finds his answers, but also realize that answers often lead to more questions. Although a little too self-deprecating at times, this is a book that packs a punch, one that makes you laugh, makes you think, and makes you feel.

[Snappety · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the Sweet Valley High series , too good to be true is too good to be true! It is an excellent book , with some flaws that spoil my enjoyment of it.

Marina is a beautiful girl , and Wellesley sophisticated. Everyone loved it sweet and lovely ! Yeah right - and the truth is that it pretends to be sweet and nice, but in reality is a bitch on the inside . Tons of people like her, but she only like the handsome Mr. Anastas . She claims to drown in a picnic that Mr. Anastas save ! That gets the ball on its round bouncy way. Elena due to drop some papers on the house of Mr. Anastas , but the Marina gladly offers to take them to them . When it do that , it goes to the yard to find Mr. Anastas gardening, his shirt is off and his naked chest give her shivers , she askes may I enjoy a drink from the hose, do obscene things with her mouth and tongue , and then deliberately wets her shirt so you can get to display an image of the little budding chest . Says later to Elena don't bother with your child sitting career I shall maintain Mr. Anastas's child. When she meets him, his name is Primo, she is nice to the face but then makes with evil, ignores him, steals the stuffed bear. Then she run off, Marina, so she could Date * sigh * Mr. Perfect " the Nominee " ! In the end Mr. Anastas appears, and she tries to kiss him , and he say stoutly : Never , I am a married person . Well, guess what? She tells everyone that he raped her ! Is it possible that the Marina is too good to be true? Read this book to find out!

The only drawback is that Eliza is in NYC I love to read about her being jealous of the Marina ! But did not know because she are not there. While it's in the Big Apple , who turns up for her, Eliza, but Marina ' s boy friend "the Nominee ." He offers her wine , too, because he loves wine and other alcohols. Then he calls her parents by their first name, Tom and Felicia . Things are very interesting , but the author really should get a job.

[Rene Saller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a memoir about failure. I wouldn't recommend reading it if you already feel like a failure, though, because this guy's failures are probably not as depressing as your own, and 42 really isn't old enough to consign yourself to Failure, especially if you're not stricken with some terrible degenerative disease, for instance. Poor Ben! He can't finish his book! He is in horrible debt, much of it his own damned fault! Never mind that a bunch of fancy people still think he's great (see back cover blurbs, publications in prestigious journals, etc). I wouldn't call it a humblebrag, but it veers close at times. He is pretty scathing toward himself ("brutally honest," and variations thereof, is a phrase that pops up in the blurbs quite a bit), but I can't help but wonder how much of it is preemptive. You can't judge me because I already hate myself so much! Everyone expected so much of me! I had it made, and I blew it! Poor, poor guy. Just three well-regarded books to his name, reasonably good health, and people who seem to love him. And for what it's worth, there are FAR more demeaning jobs to hold than that of a fact-checker at a magazine still lofty enough actually to employ fact-checkers.

The most moving parts of the book for me were the all-too-brief passages about his weird hippie childhood in the 1970s (which resonated with me, in various ways) and the almost unbearably sad descriptions of what it feels like to have only partial and sporadic visitation with a child whom you love more than anything else in the world.

I think I might have enjoyed this book more if I had been in a different frame of mind when I read it, however, so I will cut it some slack. And as for the people calling this "brutal"? I hate the phrase "white-people problems," but these are ALL white-people problems. If you want "brutal," read a book about the fucking Congo.

[Amy Keyishian · Rating 1 out of 5]

My dad has a revenge-letter rule: He might write them, and get incredible satisfaction from the zing-zing-zingers he throws at his enemies, but the secret to his success as a well-liked human being in this world is that he then puts those letters in a drawer and forgets about them. Someone should have told Benjamin Anastas this trick. Hey: I get it. He was hurt and wanted to get back at his ex-wife and her new mate. So he wrote a book full of zing-zing-zingers, but taken out of the heated soup of his righteous ire, they have the unintended and counterintuitive effect of making their targets look better and their author look worse. He excuses his own foibles with his life circumstance; anyone else's are just the product of that person being a schmuck. I Googled around after reading this book, and found out that as his marriage was dissolving and his child was gestating and his then-wife was behaving in a way he deems thoughtlessly cruel, her mother was in the final end-game of a 15-year battle with cancer. Nowhere. It doesn't even come up. It's endlessly tiresome to read chapter after chapter laser-focused attention firmly on the author's own navel.

The chapter that was described to me beforehand as "brutal," an open letter to his wife's new mate, just comes off as a pathetic sour-grapes rant. It reminded me of the letter and "pome" my high school boyfriend wrote to me when I went off to college and left him behind.

I think the lesson here for anyone who's been dumped is: sometimes you were dumped for a reason. And the longer you spend whining about it and plotting a toothless revenge, the better your chances of being dumped by your next date, and the next, and the next, each of which will be placed upon the same rickety pedestal in turn.

Blech. I need a Silkwood shower.

[Desiree Zamorano · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first heard this book being discussed, on NPR--I was utterly disinterested. A great big L went flashing over the image I'd created of the author. His self-confessed mistakes were huge reasons, to me, for the predicament he'd tumbled into.

And yet--
How easy, simplistic and disingenuous we all are when we blame the victim for circumstances out of their control. I stumbled across an interview with Anastas and Robert Birnbaum, over at Identity Theory, and saw a depth that hadn't been accessible earlier. I picked up a copy--and, due to the quality of the writing, couldn't put it down.

Chapeau, Anastas, for making us care and leading us to see your drama. From my perspective his greatest "mistake" was presuming one could make a living from literary writing. There are certainly questions I had, things, family members I wanted to know more about, but, quibbles aside, I was unable to put the book down.

Des Zamorano, author HUMAN CARGO

[Debbie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a book that members of my book club chose for July. It's not my type of book at all - a memoir written by someone struggling with his own life. I truly did not enjoy most of it, although Anastas certainly does have a talent for a good turn of phrase. It felt more like I was reading his diary, since his thoughts jumped about on her personal timeline, and I didn't always make a clear connection between one paragraph and another. Although it's a short book (about 175 pages), it felt much longer after the first 25 pages, and it never really recovered. Even the end left something to be desired.

I would not recommend it to anyone, although there are a few people I know who would appreciate the soul-searching, mixed-up style of Anastas's writing, complete with the ups and downs of his childhood, his family, his relationships, and his experiences with parenthood.

[Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I'm just projecting . . .

Who hasn't been there: divorced, broke, and not sure what the fuck you're doing with your life (the one that was supposed to turn out so differently)? I think this book demonstrates that it's not the details of life that matter in a memoir. Instead, what matters is how the author changes, grows up, and makes sense out of that life. I think he starts to do this in the last chapter that he wrote to his son. I understand that divorce and debt and learning to love again are important components to his life, yet if the book focused on his childhood and his fatherhood, I think there would have been a more cohesive and heartfelt book. To me, the book felt disjointed and unfocused.

[Deron · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book back in 2012 when I was barely emerging from the most painful summer of my adult life. A novelist friend recommended it and I really wanted to look at someone else's failure while standing in the middle of my own. I didn't get very far, but I picked it up again at the end of this summer when I was feeling mired in financial and life anxiety again. My connection with the book is strange: I definitely feel linked to it and appreciate looking at failure with this level of detail, but it's also like hard to calm the voice that says, “Well, get a job.” It's not whiny. But it is limited? I'm glad he wrote it and I'm glad I read it, but I can't imagine ever reading it again or recommending it.

[Ned Andrew Solomon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This very short memoir has some gorgeous, poignant passages - exceptional writing - caught in the midst of an overall story arc that only partially delivers. The anecdotes revolve around the author's inability to carve out a sustainable career in fiction, his constant indebtedness to a various and endless list of creditors, his failed and short-lived marriage, his parents' odd history and his devoted and deep love for his toddler son. It needed, in my opinion, a bit more time to "gestate" and perhaps a stronger team of editors.

[Nancy Martira · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is some good writing here, but a whole lot of pages on Anastas feeling sorry for himself. His more nuanced realizations are drowned out by his brow-beating that life, particularly his life, is unfair. Tiresome.

[Judy Weiss · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard to get into

Hard to get into

I never did really get to the point where I couldn't put this down. It was hard to follow and while I did finish it, I found myself wondering what I was missing.

[Paul Harrington · Rating 5 out of 5]

gruelling. awesome.

[Christina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I could barely get through this very short book or dredge up any sympathy for the author's "plight". He made a mess of his life and wallowed in it. I don't think he learned a thing.

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can't add anything to this. Sums it up prefectly: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

[Margaret · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know a lot of reviews are very positive about this book but I just couldn't connect with it. I did finish it because that is what I do with books, but i was not a part of it.

[Neil Crocker · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little too personal and not very fascinating. If he wrote this book to try to get out of debt, I'm thinking he's still broke.