Creators: Disliked This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money - and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art, and describes his ingenious, often farfetched attempts to survive on next to nothing. From the streets of New York City and Paris to the rural roads of Upstate New York, the author treats us to a series of remarkable adventures and unforgettable encounters and, in several elaborate appendixes, to previously unknown work from these years. Here are three plays that contain the seeds of inspiration for some of Auster's future work, a tabletop baseball game (complete with cards and rules), and a pseudonymous detective novel - the author's first full-length novel. Each is an example of Auster's effort to make money; each is an illustration of the artist's mind at work. The result is a book of manifold delights and discoveries, an autobiography that resembles no other.
DislikedAnd it's I think just that kind of hand-to-mouth, rags-to-riches kind of life story can be so empowering and so inspiring and this one felt astonishingly sloppy, thrown together, and leaving out like really crucial details, kind of sidestepping topics that would have been difficult to write about like his relationship to his first wife and you know, her not being able to write because she was looking after the baby and he was trying to sell his first book.
What made the match, strongest first
Mixed reactions from creators1 review