My Secret History
Paul Theroux
"The book My Secret History by Paul Theroux. Why did I want to read it and how did I found out about it? A friend of mine recommended it. It's a very personal story; it's a novel, but it kind of reads like a memoir, a personal history in a way throughout the over about 500 pages in the book. The author talks a lot about women and relationships with women; that's kind of the recurring focus. I'm from Boston, and the book starts off in Boston where he grew up; so I liked that, kind of some of the familiar sites of the city I grew up in and around. I kind of wanted him to stick more with himself as a younger man and in Boston. And a lot of that section to me, he was basically talking about all the different African women he slept with, like dozens, over the course of - I don't know - maybe the two years that he was in the Peace Corps, I just found that section a little tiresome.
Being a writer myself, well, it's written in the first person; I like to write in the first person myself, so I kind of related to that. And I like sharing personal stories. Basically, most of my fiction is just a rendition of my personal life. So I could connect to that; that's basically what this author's doing, and I do it a lot myself - tend to focus a lot on romantic or sexual relationships. I'd probably give it four stars. Yeah, it's a great book; and it was that section that to me kind of lagged when he was in Africa. So because of that - like 100-odd pages, about 20 percent of the book where I personally kind of lost interest - I'd give it four stars rather than five."
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