Reviewed by Tabitha Thompson

I began this book in 1992 ... but never got very far with it. What blocked me ...  was the imprecision of my persona and the fact that I did not know where to establish my story. I had no idea what my story was. I had never given much thought to who I was. I had always defined myself through my work, which was always about other people.

This is perhaps the most transparent information that Gay Talese offers about himself in A Writer’s Life, described as an autobiography. It is an autobiography of sorts in that it details major stories that he covered during his life, but it is the details of others’ lives that fill the pages of the book; Talese is more an escort than a topic. But to Talese, evidently, his story is in the time he spent telling others’ stories.

However, at times the book feels like a repository of previously unpublishable stories. He states he thought about writing a book about the many restaurants that inhabited a certain building, and chapters 6 through 10 are the yield of his efforts. He plans a New Yorker story about the Bobbits that never works out; chapters 22 through 27 detail their lives. Perhaps the most compelling chapters are written about Talese’s coverage of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama during the march to Montgomery in which the non-violent walkers were beaten by local police (and his subsequent coverage of the 25 year anniversary of the event.) And yet, Talese is all but missing from the story. Here we could have had the opportunity to understand what it felt like to be there, where the journalist as observer unites with human as subject experiencing a historic moment. But Talese does not divulge such information. Instead, he recounts history much like a sportscaster, detailing each move but not sharing his own experience.

Perhaps this lack of information tells the reader the most about Talese and how he has lived his life.

We in the media ...  lived vicariously through the ups and downs of other people. Our feelings were filtered, our sensibilities secondhand. With seeming sympathy and understanding, we encouraged the cooperation of those we pursued; but inwardly we were removed from the reality we recounted and the objects of our passing interest.

Thus Talese’s book is filled with the subjects he pursued, the questions he asked, the stories that were researched but (until now) went unpublished.

This is how a writer spends his life.