What do you think?
Rate this book
Secret Life: An Autobiography
At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an autobiography that is at once harrowing and redemptive, heartbreaking and profoundly moral. "By turns repelling and seductive . . . absorbing and disquieting."--New York Times Book Review.
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
126 people want to read
About the author
Michael Ryan
9 books9 followersPoet and memoirist Michael Ryan was born in St Louis, Missouri. He studied at the University of Notre Dame and Claremont Graduate School, and earned an MFA and PhD from the University of Iowa.
Ryan’s first volume, Threats Instead of Trees (1974), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His second collection, In Winter (1981), was selected by Louise Glück for the National Poetry Series. God Hunger (1989) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and his New and Selected Poems (2004) was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Over the course of his long career, Ryan has been praised for his formal control and, in the words of David Baker, his ability "to turn the apparently personal into the public and important." Writing in The Nation, William H. Pritchard alleged that Ryan "reminds us on every page that poems can be about lives, and about them in ways most urgent and delicate."
An acclaimed memoirist, Ryan's Secret Life (1995) was a New York Times Notable Book. His second memoir, Baby B (2004), was excerpted in The New Yorker. He has also published a book of essays on poetry, A Difficult Grace (2000).
Ryan has received numerous prizes for poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at such institutions as the University of Iowa (where he was an editor of The Iowa Review), Southern Methodist University, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and the University of California-Irvine, where he has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing since 1990.
(Poetry Foundation, 2011)
Ryan’s first volume, Threats Instead of Trees (1974), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His second collection, In Winter (1981), was selected by Louise Glück for the National Poetry Series. God Hunger (1989) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and his New and Selected Poems (2004) was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.
Over the course of his long career, Ryan has been praised for his formal control and, in the words of David Baker, his ability "to turn the apparently personal into the public and important." Writing in The Nation, William H. Pritchard alleged that Ryan "reminds us on every page that poems can be about lives, and about them in ways most urgent and delicate."
An acclaimed memoirist, Ryan's Secret Life (1995) was a New York Times Notable Book. His second memoir, Baby B (2004), was excerpted in The New Yorker. He has also published a book of essays on poetry, A Difficult Grace (2000).
Ryan has received numerous prizes for poetry, including a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has taught at such institutions as the University of Iowa (where he was an editor of The Iowa Review), Southern Methodist University, Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, and the University of California-Irvine, where he has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing since 1990.
(Poetry Foundation, 2011)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 15, 2012
A prizewinning poet confesses his sex addiction, reveals he was sexually molested at the age of five, gives a painful account of his horrible violent alcoholic father and tells us all he himself is the loathesomest of humans and ought to be dead.
Could be pretty interesting, I thought. Well, it really isn't.
All the above is in the first 50 pages. For the next 250 pages we get a really tedious description of growing up in 50s/60s America. We've had this a kazillion times before in better books than this one. I recently came across exactly the same kind of thing in The Risk Pool by Richard Russo and in My Lives by Edmund White.
Readers may find Michael Ryan's memories of growing up hard to take for two reasons :
1) I don't believe guys remember this stuff in this amount of detail
and
2) it's really dull
He measured all the dimensions of the basement and after dinner sat at the kitchen table scribbling on blueprints and expense sheets. He even brought home an adding machine from the office which chugged and unrolled its paper spool when he hit the keys. One of the first things he decided was the colors. It would be all black and pink.
Are you asleep yet? No? Okay try this –
When everyone had arrived we lined up and my brother called out our last names and we stepped forward and barked "Present Sir!" and saluted also with two fingers extended, as in the scout shake. Then we all crammed into cars driven by volunteer parents. We were going to the Appalachian Trail, up the Northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, into the Poconos.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The thing about sex addiction is that I don't see what the issue really is. For Michael it involved a whole string of women, none of whom he coerced, there was no violence or meanness involved, unless he's omitted that. He didn't indulge in heavy bondage, unless he's omitted that. Okay, a swathe of them were students when he was a Princeton lecturer. That's bad. (In which case all the academics in Philip Roth's novels are evil sex addicts too.) So all day long he's plotting who he can have sex with next and this costs him his marriages (it's not unusual, as Tom Jones pointed out). He doesn't discuss his marriages – you might have thought that would be relevant if sex addiction had destroyed them, but they don't rate more than a line.
Okay this sexual steeplechase is very time-consuming, I get that. But me, I got three monkeys on my back, not one. I'm obsessed with books and movies and music. Takes all my time and my money. I can hardly spare the time to go to work. Never mind talk to my family. But you won't get me joining a 12 Steps programme. I got no complaints.
Secret Life fits right into the 90s/2000s craze for misery memoirs. There's all the child abuse stuff with titles like Broken, A Child called It, Unloved, Mummy Knew, Invisible Tears and so on; then there was the literary version like Running with Scissors, Prozac Nation and Wonderland Avenue. Some of those were discovered to be embellished. No, sorry, wrong word – they were found to be fake. The whole genre is creepy. Confessions are often called brave but they could be described also as self –aggrandizing. They're brimful of the insistent pretense of candour. They're all so needy. they need us readers to love them for writing so shamelessly about their former badness. It's all a bit like something you have to take a shower after. I came to this book after reading Joe Matt's graphic novel sexual confessions – now those are great. I immediately trusted Joe Matt. But I didn't know how much to believe Michael Ryan.
This book has a really bad opening sentence
Every sex addict has his own thing, the thing he likes the most, although 'like' is hardly the word for the inexorable pull I felt and sought and sometimes still feel but with God's help one day at a time do not act on.
(So it announces itself as a 12 Steps book.) Referring again to Edmund White's autobiography, now there was a guy who could be reasonably described as a sex addict. But he doesn't moan (well, not in that sense).
Extremely not recommended.
Could be pretty interesting, I thought. Well, it really isn't.
All the above is in the first 50 pages. For the next 250 pages we get a really tedious description of growing up in 50s/60s America. We've had this a kazillion times before in better books than this one. I recently came across exactly the same kind of thing in The Risk Pool by Richard Russo and in My Lives by Edmund White.
Readers may find Michael Ryan's memories of growing up hard to take for two reasons :
1) I don't believe guys remember this stuff in this amount of detail
and
2) it's really dull
He measured all the dimensions of the basement and after dinner sat at the kitchen table scribbling on blueprints and expense sheets. He even brought home an adding machine from the office which chugged and unrolled its paper spool when he hit the keys. One of the first things he decided was the colors. It would be all black and pink.
Are you asleep yet? No? Okay try this –
When everyone had arrived we lined up and my brother called out our last names and we stepped forward and barked "Present Sir!" and saluted also with two fingers extended, as in the scout shake. Then we all crammed into cars driven by volunteer parents. We were going to the Appalachian Trail, up the Northeast extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, into the Poconos.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The thing about sex addiction is that I don't see what the issue really is. For Michael it involved a whole string of women, none of whom he coerced, there was no violence or meanness involved, unless he's omitted that. He didn't indulge in heavy bondage, unless he's omitted that. Okay, a swathe of them were students when he was a Princeton lecturer. That's bad. (In which case all the academics in Philip Roth's novels are evil sex addicts too.) So all day long he's plotting who he can have sex with next and this costs him his marriages (it's not unusual, as Tom Jones pointed out). He doesn't discuss his marriages – you might have thought that would be relevant if sex addiction had destroyed them, but they don't rate more than a line.
Okay this sexual steeplechase is very time-consuming, I get that. But me, I got three monkeys on my back, not one. I'm obsessed with books and movies and music. Takes all my time and my money. I can hardly spare the time to go to work. Never mind talk to my family. But you won't get me joining a 12 Steps programme. I got no complaints.
Secret Life fits right into the 90s/2000s craze for misery memoirs. There's all the child abuse stuff with titles like Broken, A Child called It, Unloved, Mummy Knew, Invisible Tears and so on; then there was the literary version like Running with Scissors, Prozac Nation and Wonderland Avenue. Some of those were discovered to be embellished. No, sorry, wrong word – they were found to be fake. The whole genre is creepy. Confessions are often called brave but they could be described also as self –aggrandizing. They're brimful of the insistent pretense of candour. They're all so needy. they need us readers to love them for writing so shamelessly about their former badness. It's all a bit like something you have to take a shower after. I came to this book after reading Joe Matt's graphic novel sexual confessions – now those are great. I immediately trusted Joe Matt. But I didn't know how much to believe Michael Ryan.
This book has a really bad opening sentence
Every sex addict has his own thing, the thing he likes the most, although 'like' is hardly the word for the inexorable pull I felt and sought and sometimes still feel but with God's help one day at a time do not act on.
(So it announces itself as a 12 Steps book.) Referring again to Edmund White's autobiography, now there was a guy who could be reasonably described as a sex addict. But he doesn't moan (well, not in that sense).
Extremely not recommended.
September 17, 2014
An incredibly ugly, painful, life-changing memoir from one of America's finest poets. Michael Ryan went through the earthly equivalent of hell for many, many years, progressing from molestation as a child through a crushing sex addiction and the torture of concealing it all. It unveils the dark story that colors so much of Ryan's poetry, yet bears an unmistakable twinge of hope.
February 7, 2025
two quotes: the first, describing his sexual lust, in 8th grade: “…Terri enrolled at St. Boniface. Terri was from the South, and had a voice like dark syrup, and darker eyes with a knowing look. She was also ‘stacked’. This was the definitive judgment—arrived at by a rapid plebiscite of the boys at recess the very first day Terri showed in eighth grade. We had already developed considerable expertise in this subject, masterfully distinguishing between who was really stacked and who was padding them—Annette Funicello, the Mouseketeer, being the standard against which all judgments were made. page 127. And this description of his mother, at age 14, when he comes in for breakfast after camping out in the backyard with a friend: “ ‘What do you guys do out there?’ she asked, trying to sound nonchalant as she served up our eggs. (All moms take the detective course at Mom School, but mine made Gracie Allen like look Sherlock Holmes.)” page 162.
August 2, 2018
I’m currently writing a memoir about my past drug abuse and it’s hard talking about some of the things I’ve done YET there are some things I am keeping to myself, which is what this guy should’ve done.
August 27, 2021
This is a story of a tormented Catholic soul with guilt and shame and not a sex addict. Ryan is a brilliant writer but his stories are very dull and unmemorable.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 21, 2017
When I first heard that actor David Duchovny was a "sex addict" I thought: "Aren't all men? Why would you tell anyone that? Gross." I had no idea that this was an illness, that trapped those who experience it in a world of pain. This author does an amazing, courageous, job telling his story. He painfully details all of his aberrant behavior and the reasons why he did it. You are pulling for him the whole way. He has helped many people with this brave memoir.
October 16, 2016
The cover and blurb led me to expect a sordid and explicit account of a sex addicts life.
Mostly, its is about his life growing up and how he became a sex addict through various childhood experiences. Some parts were interesting. The chapter about his sexual abuse is heartbreaking and startlingly honest, so are some of his other experiences growing up like when he describes experimenting with bestiality. It was the frankness shown in these early chapters that made me interested to read about his later experiences as a full blown sex addict, but it never really gets there.
His teenage life sounds fairly typical of most teenage boys, and the actual descriptions of his adult life only really occur in the final chapter of the book, by which point I felt like the writing had lost some of its steam.
Mostly, its is about his life growing up and how he became a sex addict through various childhood experiences. Some parts were interesting. The chapter about his sexual abuse is heartbreaking and startlingly honest, so are some of his other experiences growing up like when he describes experimenting with bestiality. It was the frankness shown in these early chapters that made me interested to read about his later experiences as a full blown sex addict, but it never really gets there.
His teenage life sounds fairly typical of most teenage boys, and the actual descriptions of his adult life only really occur in the final chapter of the book, by which point I felt like the writing had lost some of its steam.
January 20, 2008
a memoir that I thoroughly enjoyed. Well written book on sexual addiction, childhood molestation. It is a very honest book. It doesn't ask for sympathy.
Want to read
December 11, 2008Heard about this "icky memoir" from an article about literary overshares. could be interesting?
December 24, 2008
This is a brave book that is well written. It explores sexual trauma as a child and how it impacted his sexuality as an adult. It might be a hard book for many to read.
June 4, 2010
Really interesting memoir about compulsions and sexual addiction.
June 20, 2016
I'm entering the field of social work and I was interesting in reading memoirs of people. This book was well written and I could tell that the author was a poet.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews