Autoportrait

Summary: "Never has Jesse Ball's humane curiosity been more evident than here. Inspired by a memoir Edouard Levé put to paper in his 39th year, shortly before his death, this is an extraordinarily frank and intimate book that Jesse started writing on his own 39th birthday. In these pages are the many small mistakes, successes, and humiliations that make up a life, each rendered with incredible specificity. The moments captured are broken often by small memories or asides - one minute we are encountering the author's early job as a projectionist, or his family's distrust of towels, or his father's status as a correspondence chess champion, or the childhood accidents that shaped Jesse's formation as a writer and a person. Then in the next lines we find him falling in love, and caring for his brother, and ultimately losing that brother to illness. Cumulatively these moments build to the kind of power you might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Like staring at a great self-portrait by Lucian Freud or Alice Neel, you walk away feeling you know this person's flaws and qualities better than anyone you've ever met"--

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