Time out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 - Hardcover

Michaels, Leonard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573221422 ISBN 13: 9781573221429

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 1999

Synopsis

The critically acclaimed author of The Men's Club shares a collection of observations, meditations, and confidences drawn from more than thirty years of journals that capture the inner world of a man struggling to balance his diverse roles as husband, friend, lover, father, and writer. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Leonard Michaels was for many years a professor of English literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

Widely praised as a novelist (The Men's Club) and writer of short fiction (I Would Have Saved Them If I Could), Michaels, in his private journals, undertakes a relentlessly candid exploration of the labyrinth of self. The central theme of his fictionAsociety's blindness to itselfAresonates through these excerpts. His first wife, Sylvia, committed suicide at age 24 in 1963, a tragedy that, judging from this confessional, left him emotionally numb for years. In minimalist, deadpan prose, he re-creates their Greenwich Village milieu, conjuring a circle of off-kilter urban characters who seem as self-absorbed and neurotic as any Seinfeld coterie. Michaels drifted through two more marriages, both ending in divorce, fathered three children, crisscrossed the country, taught English in upstate New York and at UC-Berkeley and shifted between periods of gregariousness and solitude. He often comments astutely on the inability to express love and on the compromises couples make. Above all, Michaels captures the loneliness and exhilaration of being a writer, which for him means going against the grain, resisting the reigning illusions sustained by advertising, news, politics and the zeitgeist. A seismic register of daily thoughts and observations, this journal sometimes descends into the mundane, but every so often quietly rises to magnificence: "Courage is continuing to perform your daily tasks, and being hopeful despite the odds, not inflicting your fears on others, and remaining sensitive to their needs and expectations, and also not supposing, because you're dying, nothing matters any longer." First serial to the New Yorker. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Hailed by the likes of Styron and Hawkes, Michaels remains largely undiscovered by the general public, though he has been publishing fiction and nonfiction since the sixties. In these diaries, Michaels exposes his life and ruminations and serves up anecdotes involving his three wives, children, career, and the self-doubts he has had regarding all of it. Some of the entries are funny, some quite somber, and a few downright harrowing--especially his description of a friend's illegal abortion in the sixties. Such is Michaels' ability to transform snatches of his life into a truly literary form that often the pieces read like short, short stories that instantaneously capture the reader's imagination. If there is one drawback to this book it is that there are not enough entries; people come and go from Michaels' life and we don't really know what happens to them--especially his older children. Perhaps there will be a further edition, or perhaps it was all too painful to set down on paper. Whichever the reason, these diaries serve as a testament of three decades as an American writer outside the great publicity machine. Frank Caso

Novelist Michaels (The Men's Club; Sylvia) began keeping a journal in 1961 when he could not confide in anyone else about his troubled first marriage. As the years passed, his journals became a part of his lifeAhe took them wherever he went. What is published here is a portion of those diaries over the years. Through them, the reader gets to know this critically acclaimed writer and the events and people who helped shape his life and art, including the suicide of his first wife and the beginning of his writing career. It is a rare opportunity to peer into one family's life and innermost thoughts. The entries, often humorous, often reflective, always enlightening, are essential reading. Recommended for all libraries.ARon Ratliff, Emporia P.L., KS
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573221422
• ISBN 13: 9781573221429
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 214