A masterful memoir from a master. With trademark acerbic wit, erudition and yes, shade, Vidal takes us through the first forty years of his life with reflections and asides from the time of his writing (the mid-nineties). What a life he led! Family, war, writing and sex and a cast of characters who dominated the culture, politics and society of the second half of the twentieth century. Tinged with melancholy on the passage of time and haunted by the first (and only?) true love of his life, a friend and lover from youth who is killed at Iwo Jima, this unfinished story of his “other half” is a deep and complex thread weaved throughout this book and Vidal’s life.

Brilliant memoir. Spanning an eclectic cast of characters and generations of politics, literature and history. Gore Vidal’s memoirs aren’t just him retelling the story of his life and work but the universe around him, and the stories of so many wonderful people who were no longer around to tell their own. From literary gossip and intellectual curiosity to political intrigue and social growth. Vidal’s winding memoirs are universal in their own intimate ways.

He claims he did it with Jack Kerouac.

This is funny and gossipy and fascinating on mid century America, but I won’t lie it took me three tries and six months to get through. His favorite thing to do is list the acidic stories famous people have told about him and then explain, loftily, why they’re wrong and it never happened that way. Always interesting; occasionally unbearable. It does make me want to read some of his fiction though.

Once again I've read a book out of order. After first reading Point to Point Navigation, I knew the completist in me would demand that I get around to reading Palimpsest too. I'm glad I did because Gore Vidal's earlier years are far more interesting than the latter half of his life. And to be honest, I probably also wanted to know the salacious details of the infamous "buddy boy" altercation he had with Bobby Kennedy, plus his litigious animus against Truman Capote. Anecdotes such as these and countless others fill this book.

Vidal was supremely talented and a very gifted writer; and if you're not sure about that he's glad to relieve you of your doubts in this very memoir.

His was a life that was both impressive and charmed, though by the end of it I had certainly had my fill. His self-reverence is noxious. Still, I do think that he's an American icon and someone who certainly contributed greatly to the cultural landscape in the last century. Just brace yourself for plenty of name-dropping meanderings.

This was a pure delight to read. Vidal is an erudite, witty, and really just plain fun person to spend a book with.

Gore Vidal was a massive dickhead. I cannot fathom why all these amazing people would spend time with him. The list of friends and contemporaries reads like some kind of insane post second World War Who's Who. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, JFK, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Norman Mailer, Jack Keruoac, Allen Ginsberg, Frank Capra, Italo Calvino, Princess Margaret... the list goes on and on and on.

I suppose if you can easily switch between novels, TV and film, if you're stepbrother to Jackie O, and your grandfather was the first Senator of Oklahoma, you're not exactly disenfranchised.

It took me practically the entire book to realize that Mr. Vidal was acting. He created a character and was playing it for a standing ovation. The crucial takeaway, unlike so many of his friends and contemporaries, is that he has no core beliefs, no true sense of self. He solely responds.

If you take him for the queen he is, it's all very silly stuff and not to be taken seriously.

I thought I loved Gore Vidal. I’ve spent decades enjoying his wit and knowing that I shared with him a wisdom of the world. But this memoir has been a rude awakening. Either I’ve been delusional or the world has changed and me with it. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve never loved his writings, I just loved belonging to the club. His irreverence felt irrelevant; his cleverly acerbic waxings felt more like smug dismissals. I should love his references of a multitude of literary figures but I just found it tediously long and terribly painful. This is one of the few books that I simply couldn’t finish. I feel like l’ve lost something special, an old friend through a bitter breakup, my college years as fond memories fade. It’s as though the harsh reality of the present unforgivingly bleaches out our nostalgia into brittle pages. Maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I read this? Maybe I’m making excuses?

This memoir covers the first forty years of the Vidal saga, alighting on his blind senator Grandpa, savage alcoholic mother, childhood sweetheart, licentious sex life, and endless hobnobbery with the most prominent actors and politicians of the period as he mosies up the Hollywood ladder and cosies up with Kennedys. Written in the sumptuously arch manner familiar to anyone who has seen a Vidal clip on YouTube, the memoir establishes a warm if prickly tone, and treats the reader as an intelligent confidant(e) for the duration. Vidal’s life was far from “tough” in the street sense, but it wasn’t without personal and financial trials. Far from being drip-fed millions since birth, Gore’s father was a Scrooge and his mother a vengeful rival who delighted in his failures. Since he moved in a world where homosexuality was not the lynching offence it was to the lower orders (in the 40s), he was able to enjoy full sexual freedom and promiscuity, despite the predictable condemnation of The City and the Pillar that forced him to work for a decade in theatre, film and TV, where he made enough to become the leisurely aesthete he aimed to be (i.e. to achieve complete artistic freedom, rather than a wanton lust for money—though Vidal was clearly used to a expensive lifestyle and eager to maintain this). Apart from some rather bland material towards the end on Jackie & Jack Kennedy, who seem to be deeply uninteresting figures on the whole, this is a swinging memoir of an outstanding life that will induce fits of envious knuckle-biting and book punching. But that’s our problem.

Delicious.

Delicious book.

A link to my review: http://buenogato.wordpress.com/2012/0...