3.5 

Memoirs

By Tennessee Williams & John Waters
Memoirs by Tennessee Williams & John Waters digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

For the "old crocodile," as Williams called himself late in life, the past was always present, and so it is with his continual shifting and intermingling of times, places, and memories as he weaves this story.

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the mediathough long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by The New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, thirty years later, Williams' look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

And, of course, Memoirs is filled with Williams' amazing friends from the worlds of stage, screen, and literature as heoften hilariously, sometimes fondly, sometimes notremembers them: Laurette Taylor, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tallulah Bankhead to name a few. And now film director John Waters, well acquainted with shocking the American public, has written an introduction that gives some perspective on the various reactions to Tennessee's Memoirs, while also paying tribute to a fellow artist who inspired many with his integrity and endurance.

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Memoirs Reviews

3.5
“Interesting for an avid Williams fan, but very uneven and probably of little value to those less dedicated to the author.”
““They offered me a $50,000 advance, and I thought I’d be dead by the time it came out”, John Waters quotes Tennessee Williams on writing his Memoirs. A statement which Williams allegedly wrote to ‘bait’ his enemies – i.e. critics of Memoirs on it’s publication. However I think this statement pretty much sums up TW’s approach to the book. In fact it was John Waters’ introduction that saved Memoirs for me. Waters invites us to view the book as if we’re basically down the pub with TW. And viewed in that sense, it works a lot better. I think it’s safe to say, that if you’re not familiar with TW’s work, then this is not a good place to start. Or rather, it is definitely not a shining example of his formidable literary genius. (And I think his statement about the advance, ‘baiting his enemies’, lets us know that he would most likely wholeheartedly agree with this.) The book itself is all over the place, and rambles along. Perhaps more sympathetically, should be described as a stream of consciousness. And this is clearly exactly what TW intends it to be. So pull up a pew, and a large whisky…”

About Tennessee Williams

 Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) was America’s most influential playwright. Readers have devoured his poetry, essays, short stories, and letters, as well as his fantastic late plays, his remarkable corpus of one-acts, and his greatest plays—The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, Suddenly Last Summer, and Camino Real. Williams is a cornerstone of New Directions—we publish everything he wrote. He is also our single bestselling author.

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