More fun than Star in terms of insider gossip on STARS as well as wannabes. Do paths intersect today between politics, Hollywood and the literary world as it did post-war?

Very insightful although I got stuck about a 3rd of the way thru. Best part? Interesting discussion of looking back on history indicating things aren’t as bad as they appear at the time. RE: now when things look bleak to me. If you laud JFK this book will shock you as author spent time with him and it wasn’t just the womanizing that was a problem. Complicated relationship: he and Jackie shared a step father. He said his mother prepared the way for Jackie’s mother. All the more juicy. Takes you thru a successful varied writing life: early novels, then plays, magazine articles, TV, Hollywood and then politics, which was part of his heritage. Oh and he’s gay so you have that to learn about too.

Discovering Gore Vidal in my 40’s (via the first of his books that I read, Burr) gives me hope that life still has some excellent surprises in store for me even when I’m old. I love this man and his writings. He made fun of everything, including himself. He was aware of his privileged position in society but also understood that he had done nothing to get there other than be born into one type of family and not another. He seems to get a great thrill out of revealing the rich and famous for the average people that they actually are, with all their petty insecurities and stupid ideas just like we have. He slept with whomever he wanted — thousands, he says — with not a hint of guilt. How could I NOT love him? His memoir gives a lot of time to JFK and Jackie, and by the end you will feel like you know them too. I rated this book 4 stars rather than 5 only because I did have to pay attention in order to get the most possible delight out of every sentence, but it was worth it. I look forward to reading all of his books, and hope I never come to the end.

Gossipy, snippy, name dropping, etc. Not sure if I liked it or not but it seemed difficult to put down at times.

I struggled to get through this book. Vidal's excessive name-dropping and snarky characterizations of people he didn't like (or who didn't like him) got very tedious and irritating. He lived a fascinating life, for sure, but seemed to spend more of this book complaining about his family, other authors, politicians, Hollywood big-wigs and just life in general. The book is full of salacious gossip, catty innuendoes and nasty anecdotes. A major theme of the book is sexual orientation, Vidal's as well as nearly everyone around him. As a memoir, Vidal reflects on a most usual childhood and ancestry. His recollections of a childhood relationship with a classmate who died young at Iwo Jima are pervasive. They engaged in homoerotic behavior as adolescents, leaving Vidal with longings and nostalgic memories that continued through his entire life. He even arranges to be buried near him along with an adult companion. It is never really clear whether Vidal was gay but the majority of his relationships seemed to be with men, many of whom were admitted homosexuals.

Parts of the book were compelling, especially those concerning the Kennedy family and his visits to Hyannis and Washington. But, it was my impression that Vidal was his own biggest fan, mystified when critics and the public did not share his high opinions of his writing.

I probably wouldn't recommend the book. The writing was confusing at times, more of a stream-of-consciousness approach and many of the literary references were very obscure and went over my head. His legendary feuds with Truman Capote and William F. Buckley are glossed over and presented as completely due to flaws in the other person's basic character. In my opinion the book could have been much shorter and less bloated with self-aggrandizing rhetoric.

It is quite interesting to listen to this memoir, having read quite a few of the authors books previously. He comes from a background of privilege. He is a first class name dropper, and he has plenty of names to drop. He published his first book at the age of 20. He went to high class schools. But not college. He spent time with the Roosevelts and the Kennedys. He ran for Congress in New York, and lived in Italy for decades are.

He was a screenwriter and a playwright, and found success in just about everything he did other than maybe love. His best love was with a friend when he was a teenager, but the friend was killed in the war. He talks a lot about his sex life, which is mostly with men and boys And relatively casual. If you have read his books, you know that he has a certain brilliance. But it would be hard to say whether or not he had a happy life. He had a bad relationship with his mother.

In this memoir, he makes reference to a number of his books, as well as plays and movies. All in all I thought this book was more interesting than some of his novels. But I did think that experiencing this book after several of his novels was the right accidental thing to happen. It was a pretty bold and forthcoming story of quite a few aspects of his life, although it is not clear, whether all of his stories are exactly accurate or true.

Gore Vidal turned 70 in 1995, and with such a momentous occasion for both author and public, it is rather fitting that he decided to publish a memoir, something he previously said he wouldn’t do. What got him to change his mind? Perhaps it was a sense that many of his generation were already gone, lost to time as we all will be. Conversely, Vidal’s sense of resilience might have encouraged him to write his life story, showing all who were interested that he was hanging on to torment the ruling class he had run from his entire life.

Palimpsest: A Memoir is easily one of Gore’s best books— encyclopedic in its knowledge of his era, touching about the people he cared for, and biting towards those he loathed. The title embodies the approach he took when writing his memoir; palimpsest is a piece of writing that is erased to be written over, but some of the previous writing remains. Vidal, always one to break with standard literary convention, jumps around in time within each chapter, such as reflecting on a story about the playwright Tenneesee Williams in 1948 and then recalling the day's events in 1992. There’s a frenetic energy in the book that I find wonderfully intoxicating, as Gore saunters from moment to moment in his life, never staying in one place for too long.

Born in 1925 at West Point, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was the son of a dashing former college athlete-turned-aviator and the daughter of a U.S. Senator. Early in life he realized how unlike his parents he actually was, preferring to read for long hours in his grandfather’s attic than playing sports with other boys. His grandfather, Thomas Pryor “T. P.” Gore represented Oklahoma in the Senate, a state he helped found. Blind by adolescence, he needed someone to read to him in order to glean knowledge, something his grandson dutifully did. Gore had a good relationship with his father Gene, who supported him but didn’t quite understand him. By contrast, his relationship with his mother Nina soured early, largely due to her histrionic personality and intense alcoholism.

Vidal remarked that love is something he didn’t quite get, yet he did feel an overwhelming sense of affection for a classmate of his at St. Albans school for boys, Jimmy Trimble. Gore called Trimble his “twin,” who completed him in more ways than one. Handsome, athletically gifted, and socially adept, he represented the closest thing Gore experienced as love until he met Howard Austen, his lifetime partner, in the 1950s. Like Vidal, Trimble served in World War II but sadly died during the battle of Iwo Jima, mere months before the end of the war. He was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.; Vidal picked out a plot near him in the early 1990s, where his final resting place is today.

He served on a supply ship in the Aleutian Islands during World War II, happy to get away from the confining walls of Exeter Academy, where he graduated high school. His experiences during the war inspired his first novel, published when he was only 20 years old, Williwaw. Hailed early as an important novelist of his generation, Vidal decided to throw caution to the wind and, in 1948, published The City and Pillar, one of the first mainstream American novels to deal with the subject of homosexuality. Despite some good reviews and plaudits from people as varied as Thomas Mann and Alfred Kinsey, The City and the Pillar left Vidal culturally blacklisted by the New York Times and other publications.

Eager to be financially independent and continually relevant, Vidal put novels on the backburner for a decade, moving headlong into writing plays for television. One such play, the anti-war satire Visit to a Small Planet, made its way to broadway with much success. This was a transitional period for Vidal, as he testifies in the book. While he desired to get back to novel writing, he also enjoyed working on plays and films, especially 1959’s Ben-Hur, where he made substantial contributions to the production despite receiving writing credit. He also continued his interest in politics, becoming closer to future president John F. Kennedy and interviewing Senator Barry Goldwater. The latter interview became a part of his first collection of published essays, which proved to be a major component of his writing output and cultural impact.

In 1960, Vidal ran for congress, hoping to win New York’s 29th district where he lived. Hot off the success of his play, The Best Man, a drama which focused on a national political convention, Vidal hoped to parlay that success into his own political career. Vidal worked hard to win the district, learning about its issues, especially dairy farming, and speaking to small groups all across the district. He ran on a more progressive platform, advocating for federal education funding and American recognition of the People’s Republic of China, tempered by a pragmatic, independent approach to winning swing voters. While he lost the election to incumbent Republican J. Ernest Wharton 57 percent to 43, he performed better than any Democrat in the district in 50 years and even outperformed Kennedy. Vidal would tip his toe into political campaigns again in the early 1970s and early 1980s, but never recaptured the success he had in the 1960 election. His 1960 run also helped him realize that he’d rather be a writer critiquing power than a politician holding power.

The back half of Palimpsest deals somewhat exclusively on his friendship with JFK, which would eventually fizzle out when Vidal decided to move to Rome and he lost favor with some of the president’s inner circle, especially Robert Kennedy. You get a sense that Vidal liked Kennedy a lot but had serious misgivings about his presidency, as the Bay of Pigs, his disastrous first meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis attested to. Gore desperately wanted out of the world of presidential politics and its social requirements, so he left for Rome to write his first novel in years, a chronicle of the 4th century Roman emperor, Julian.

…And that’s where the memoir leaves off, leaving the rest of his life to be written about in future essays and his final memoir, Point to Point Navigation (2006). Palimpsest is an unreserved classic, easily one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read. Vidal enchants the reader with his erudition, intelligent criticism, and steadfast iconoclasm. If someone were to ask me which of his books to start with, Palimpsest would be at the top of the list.

I'm not quite sure why I took this book out of the library. I sometimes find that I like literary biographies of authors more than the books they wrote, and I've never read any books by Gore Vidal.

After reading this one, I'm still not sure if I'll read any others, but I found this one quite interesting, and in many places, especially the earlier part, witty and humorous. As the title suggests, he jumps backwards and forwards in time, sometimes writing over what he has already written, and sometimes the chronology is a little confusing, especially when discussing people he had known for a long time.

As a writer he met lots of other writers, and the book is a cross between a literary who's who and a scurrilous gossip column. On the whole, however, he didn't much like the company of other writers, even though he had met quite a lot of them, and he seems to have had fallings out with those he knew quite well, among whom were Tennessee Williams the playwright and Truman Capote the novelist. I was most interested in what he said about Beat Generation writers, as I have been particularly interested in them, and he knew Allen Ginsberg quite well, and had met some of the others, including Jack Kerouac, in whose book The Subterraneans he appeared as Arial Lavalina.

There is also quite a lot of political gossip, which throws an interesting light on American politics in the early 1960s. Vidal and Jackie Kennedy Onassis shared a common stepfather, whom both of their mothers had married for his money. Vidal himself even stood (or ran) for election at the time that Jack Kennedy was running for President, though he did not have a high opinion of most of the other members of the Kennedy administration, or of Kennedy himself, whom he regarded as a warmonger.

Concerning his own life, Vidal hated his mother, and had only one true love, Jimmy Trimble, whom he met at school, and they were lovers from the age of 12 until the age of 19, when Jimmy Trimble was killed in the Second World War. Thereafter Vidal had a preference for casual anonymous sex, a preference which, he says, he shared with Jack Kennedy, and thought sex was inimical to friendship. He did have a lifelong companion, but according to Vidal their relationship was premissed on "no sex".

Vidal was also involved in film and television, and wrote several plays, some for television, some for the stage, and he also wrote the screenplay for several films. As a result quite a lot of his personal reminiscences involve actors, directors and producers in the film industry, and it is only his acerbic wit that keeps the parts of his book that deals with them from being a standard celeb gossip column.

An enjoyable read, and quite illuminating, but I'm still not sure if I'll try to read any of his fiction.

Dense, and beautifully written.

Gore Vidal had connections to a lot of famous people (Truman Capote, the Beats, Kennedys) and he liked expounding on the impressions they made in his life. He was a marvelous writer with a marvelous vocabulary but his memoir sounded like gossip. However, due to his fairly arrogant tell-it-like-he-saw-it attitude these famous people got cut down and became more real. A chapter that will stick with me described his last visit with Allen Ginsberg, who I find quite visionary, and casually detailed Ginsberg's health problems as an elderly man. The most intriguing aspects of the book are his recurring sense of nostalgia for his first love, Jimmie, and the first picture of him with his white cat.

I wish I could give this book a higher grade. Vidal is a consummate favourite of mine with his robust way of saying things and his clear minded sight of hisTory, but this memoir went all over, sometimes with great insight and sometimes just plain confusing to follow. Still, it has a cast of characters the world will never see again and that was worth it.

I loved this book from beginning to end and how about the title? Wonderful. Gore Vidal was witty, smart with great connections.