Rather than setting New Year’s Resolutions, I establish themes for the year, and my 2024 theme is Palimpsest. So, in keeping with that theme, I tracked down Vidal’s sprawling memoir, replete with its references to the movers and shakers of mid-20th Century Washington and Hollywood – and more! – and placed it on my TBR list. What a life he had!

Of course, the behind-the-veil revelations Vidal reveals are delightfully salacious, and it’s clear that at the time of writing, he had zero f---s to give; however, the real beauty of the memoir is not in the interesting yarns he spins or the names he drops, but rather, in the exquisite structure – outlined at the start of the book – he chooses to frame the work. It is a living palimpsest, with memories – both real and imagined? – layered on top of one another, the consequences of decisions made arriving several years later, yet featured alongside the original stories. It’s an impressive feat, and a powerful way of structuring a nonfictional narrative.

3 stars (more like 3.5). The largest problem I face with Vidal is that I simply don’t enjoy his style of writing. Granted, I’ve only picked up two of his works; however, both have not been pleasureful reading. They’ve been a slog. Still, the writing is brilliant, so it’s difficult to fault him. Through all its powerful vocabulary and dramatic juxtapositions, juicy gossip and intransigent reflections on a wide array of celebrities, writers, and politicians, the text never truly grabbed me or compelled me to finish. This is my last Gore Vidal work for a while, I think.

This book revealed many things to me that I had not previously known about Gore Vidal, all of them enlightening. He was in so many ways a remarkable person. What I took away from it was his straightforward honesty in nearly all facets of his life and his razor sharp commentary on our modern day tendencies and mores. It's a very good read.

Difficult to get into

Memoir of the American author. Very easy reading as it is frothy material-stories about the people Vidal knew and he seemed to know everyone. Very good on his early love Jimmie Trimble and his grandfather the Senator. He exhibits remarkable equanimity over being blackballed after he published his novel The City and the Pillar in 1948. Entertaining on writing scripts for Hollywood especially Ben-Hur. His memories of Jackie and JFK are endlessly fascinating. I had one major beef. GV was renowned as a great and fearless truth teller but his reference to World War II as 'Roosevelt's imperial war' was to me, cant. Still a great read packed with sharp observation.

His writing is amazing and so is his life. Fantastic and witty.

Oops, now I've bought this book twice, probably from the same Borders on Ponce De Leon in Atlanta. I obviously didn't do a good job reading it the first time since I just picked up the paperback this weekend, skimmed it,and thought "Well, this looks like a good Labor Day weekend read" and bought it. Strangely enough, the people portrayed in this autobiography, didn't seem to work a whole lot. Perhaps the gorgon masquerading as his mothers overshadowed much of the story so I was always anxious that she'd show up again and lash out with malice and cruelty. Read this book, go kiss your mother and tell her you're the luckiest child in the world.

This was a great autobiography. It really gets to the thoughts and soul of a great writer and thinker of the 20th century.

Reading this was almost like having lunch with an old aunt who knew some famous people decades earlier and listening to her spin tales about them in an hour, while you eat, and then hearing her say "oh gosh, got to run, we'll meet next week?". And then all week looking forward to hearing some more.
It's banter at times that doesn't follow a set timeline. The conversations as I call them, sort of switch back and forth and it's very easy lose track of who he's talking about except for the VERY famous.

At times very interesting and at times very, very dry. I'm glad I did read but there were times I was very happy to set it down and get away from it.

Still thinking this one over; will return with a review and rating.

Okay, I'm back.

This one is tricky--Vidal is among my favorite writers, and he does not disappoint here, but his constant bitchiness--while fun--can be tiresome. Poor Jackie O!

Of most interest to me was his perception of the world from the perspective of the year it was written (1994, I believe?). He comes off as having the whole world figured out, but as we know, in 1994, we hadn't seen nothin' yet!

Which means I need to read the follow-up memoir that was published in 2006.

I'm not a huge fan of Gore's novels, but this memoir, and to a slightly lesser extent its followup (Point to Point Navigation) is fascinating and entertaining. Gore's age, class, and profession have allowed him to be in contact with just about every important person in art, politics, and pop culture in the last century. He moves seamlessly between describing FDR's inauguration parade, his friendship with Amelia Earhart, his rivalry with Truman Capote, and his lunch with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as though these are all entirely normal series of events. He is an ideal witness to history. Very frank, both about events and personalities, as well as about the limitations of memory and perspective.

Let’s talk about name-dropping. It’s often the mark of the social climber, those who seek to inflate their importance by appearing on the margins of the lives of people more interesting than they. It’s never in good taste, is it? Then there is the closely related phenomenon, gossip. Tacky, right?
Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, abounds in both, yet this reader never felt that Vidal ever lacked a sense of his right to be exactly where he was, even the White House. While his own life didn’t lack achievement—and he makes sure to include mention of his best-selling books and theater and film triumphs—these things seem to interest him less than the people he’s been able to observe at close range, beginning with his senator grandfather and his step-sister Jackie (“whose boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice were a great joy to me”), but including Eleanor Roosevelt, Marlon Brando, the Kennedys, the Windsors, Princess Margaret (“far too bright for her station in life”), Tennessee Williams, good friends Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and rivals like Norman Mailer. Of course, Vidal might question the term rivals. He would concede that Mailer and others saw him as a rival but denies being envious of anyone else’s success. Well, that may be so; nonetheless, Vidal does use the book to settle some scores, particularly with Truman Capote, whom he pays the left-handed compliment of possessing an inventive imagination, only to lament that he never used it in his attempts to write fiction.
Readers of Vidal’s essays (he was one of the best twentieth-century practitioners of that form) will also recognize some of his recurrent themes, such as his rejection of the auteur school of film criticism. Great films from the Hollywood studios, with few exceptions, owed more to producer and screenwriter than to the director, he asserts. Not that the creation of great movies was the goal. One of Vidal’s bon mots characterized film-making as doing well what shouldn’t be done at all.
Another of Vidal’s recurrent themes is his depiction of the U. S. as the National Security State. He recounts how slowly he came to this realization, despite living in Guatemala when the CIA engineered a coup at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
Despite the name-dropping and the gossip, this book lacks a third feature of many memoirs: there is little kiss and tell. Instead, Vidal is more at pains to set the record straight on those he didn’t sleep with, despite reports to the contrary, beginning with Anaïs Nin. And even if he wanted to name those he slept with, he wouldn’t be able to in most cases: his preferred form of sexual activity was the anonymous one-night stand. The exception haunts the entire story, the schoolmate who died on Iwo Jima and remained the love of Vidal’s life.
To the Elizabethans, it was the play. In the enlightenment, the essay. In the nineteenth century, it was the novel. Vidal was a master of all of these archaic forms. In our day, it is the memoir. With Palimpsest, Vidal produced a masterpiece of this genre as well. Perhaps its quality is due in part to paradox abounding. Vidal avers, “I am not social,” yet his company seems to have been sought out by people who had many others to choose from. He protests the past doesn’t interest him yet writes of it in a way that interests us. One more thing that sets this apart from many other memoirs and is one of the many ways the title, Palimpsest, is well-chosen: Vida repeatedly lets the present intrude. He records where he is as he writes, with details of the weather, his blood pressure, and the research process of finding people he last saw fifty years previously. All of this is told with the elegance and wit one expects from Gore Vidal. An excellent read.

Of course one cannot help but be entertained by the pompous and regal Vidal, raised in privilege but excluded from his apparent birthright because he was not quite straight (he didn’t believe in the sexual orientation labels that became fashionable so I am treading gingerly). It didn’t matter what others thought of him — for Gore Vidal only his own opinion mattered. And so many opinions! What fervently nursed grudges! All those unforgiven slights!

For some reason I believe it is important to remember that Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were among his best and longtime friends.