One Hundred Autobiographies

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet.

Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story.

One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

David Lehman is a poet and writer whose many books include New and Selected Poems, The Daily Mirror, and Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he won ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award. Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the series editor of The Best American Poetry. He divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

While in throes of fighting cancer, David Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book's moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman's forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is.

Lehman's memoir pulses with life and memory.

Poet and critic Lehman...brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Lehman's exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain.