A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel.
At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying--and failing--to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg.
Consultant/Reader/writer
Roth's My Life as a Man in which Nathan Zuckerman is born, after two stories by the writer who isn't Nathan is a great one... https://twitter.com/leorobsonwriter/status/1529564911533170689
teacher, songwriter @pizzaguymusic, critic @thenation, @newrepublic, @thebafflermag, etc.
Philip Roth, My Life as a Man (1974) https://t.co/BN5rOCpkgu
The Twittering Machine: https://t.co/zQIWWqL5UL Comm. ed. @ Salvage. Writing @ NYT, AJE, LRB etc. Patreon: https://t.co/HfuV0Yk4gg Rep: https://t.co/D2Fja7060m
Finally, some of the most useful reflections on writing, oddly, I've found in buried in Philip Roth's middle-period novels (The Professor of Desire, My Life As a Man, etc).
"[My Life as a Man is] a scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women." --Newsday
"A very grand work ... in invention, in perception ... in coming to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art." --New York Times