Memoirs of a Minotaur: Adventures Among the Powerful & Gifted from Merrill Lynch to Patty Hearst - Softcover

Magowan, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1885266790 ISBN 13: 9781885266798

Publisher: Story Line Press, 2000

Synopsis

Award-winning poet Robin Magowan, grandson of the founder of Merrill Lynch and nephew of the poet James Merrill, recounts his life story. In a memoir spanning the early days of Charles Merrill's empire to the political nightmare of the Patty Hearst kidnapping, he tells the story of how he rebelled against his station in life and ultimately found redemption in poetry. Lacks an index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

About the Author

Robin Magowan taught at the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley.

From Kirkus Reviews

A poet's passionate memoir about the bumpy road that led him to rebel against a life of wealth and entitlement and seek salvation in poetry, women, and drugs. Magowan, grandson of the founder of Merrill Lynch, makes clear early on that money and privilege are fun and exciting, but they can be suffocating, too. Like the minotaur of Greek myth, Magowan sees himself ``imprisoned in a sacred labyrinth'' constructed of social and familial pressures. The authors portrait of his extended family is Tolstoyan in its weary unhappiness. Father and grandfather, giants in the world of finance and in Magowan's emotional life, dominate the picture. Tyrannical masters of family fortunes and fate, these two men come to life in all their grandeur and ugliness. On the other extreme lies Magowan's uncle, the celebrated poet James Merrill. Gay, successful, and independent, Merrill is proof to his nephew that spiritual grace comes not only from business success, but from artistic endeavor (success, too). Memoirs of a Minotaur begins with Magowan's youth under the shadow of his father (with whom he admits to being ``obsessed'') and grandfather, and describes the bleak emotional life set against a lush material landscape in Manhattan and Southampton. Then on to his emotional and intellectual education at Harvard, where he studies literature and marries too young. While Magowan continues to talk about his father nonstop, he embarks on the long process of gaining maturity and independence, which occupies the better part of the author's adult life. Magowan experiments with women, drugs, poetry, the West Coast, the 60s, and Greece in his long and clearly arduous attempt to discover himself as a writer and as a person. In the end, its his intense sexual ties with a member of the radical Symbionese Liberation Army who gets killed in a raid that ends Magowan's great psychic quest for self-knowledge. Magowan's self-portrayal is less than empathetican indication that he has, perhaps, emerged from the labyrinth. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Story Line Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1885266790
• ISBN 13: 9781885266798
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384