Do I Owe You Something?: A Memoir of the Literary Life Review

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(More customer reviews)Though we know him now mostly from his writing about tennis and true crime, once upon a time Michael ("Mike") Mewshaw had loftier ambitions and moved with the famous novelists of his day (the 1970s is the period treated in this book), aided and abetted by his lovely wife, Linda, whom William Styron called, "Slim." You will love reading Mewshaw's accounts of his brushes with fame, as he tries to get this one to write a blurb for his book, the other one to write him a reference letter. He is endearing, always saying and doing the exact wrong thing, and managing to alienate the shallow people he wants to impress. His account of meeting Eleanor Clark and her rudeness to him is very well written. She is a monster in human form, even down to having a face with a tragic flaw in it which made her look as though she were sneering all the time. Eventually her personality came to match her face (according to this book, there may be another side to the story). And Mewshaw's account of the Southern writer Peter Taylor is another prize. What a terrible person!
When he gets to Rome, he tries repeatedly to impress the once-famous novelist Anthony Burgess, who wrote A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Instead he has a hilarious eight-hour encounter with Burgess' wife, an excitable and grasping Italian, and their little boy of 7, a wild child with nothing but id. In this context we come to admire Harold Robbins, the lowbrow best-seller. He may not have been esteemed to critics, but at least he was generous to Mike and Linda!

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As a graduate student, Michael Mewshaw overheard his girlfriend propositioned by James Dickey, served as chauffeur and drinking companion to William Styron, and under George Garrett's direction impersonated a Playboy fiction editor on television.So he began a remarkable literary life in which Mewshaw grants us the sizable pleasure of passing time with some of the twentieth century's finest and most interesting writers.Mewshaw describes poignant episodes and painful lessons, including his complex relationship with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark.But his memoir is also filled with humorous events: mistaking Carlos Fuentes for James Jones's handyman, being tricked into babysitting Anthony Burgess's precocious son, and receiving publishing advice from safari-garbed pulp novelist Harold Robbins.Mewshaw recounts visits with Paul Bowles in Tangier, brief collisions with the likes of Mary McCarthy and William Gaddis, and enduring friendships with Graham Greene, Pat Conroy, and Gore Vidal.Vivid and original, this book shimmers with Mewshaw's talent as a reporter and travel writer and benefits from a novelist's distinctive voice and flawless instinct for what makes a situation sad or important, arresting or just plain funny.Do I Owe You Something? Will appeal to anyone who has ever yearned to write or to meet the men and women who do.