Synopses & Reviews
As a graduate student, Michael Mewshaw overheard his girlfriend propositioned by James Dickey, served as chauffeur and drinking companion to William Styron, and under George Garrett's direction impersonated a Playboy fiction editor on television. So began a remarkable literary life in which Mewshaw not only published more than a dozen books but also met and befriended author celebrities at home and abroad. In his unblinking but fair-minded memoir, Mewshaw grants us the sizable pleasure of passing time with some of the twentieth century's finest and most interesting writers.
Mewshaw describes poignant episodes and painful lessons, including his complex relationship with Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark. But his memoir is also filled with humorous events: mistaking Carlos Fuentes for James Jones's handyman, being tricked into babysitting Anthony Burgess's precocious son, and receiving publishing advice from safari-garbed pulp novelist Harold Robbins. Mewshaw recounts visits with Paul Bowles in Tangier, brief collisions with the likes of Mary McCarthy and William Gaddis, and enduring friendships with Graham Greene, Pat Conroy, and Gore Vidal.
Vivid and original, this book shimmers with Mewshaw's talent as a reporter and travel writer and benefits from a novelist's distinctive voice and flawless instinct for what makes a situation sad or important, arresting or just plain funny. Do I Owe You Something? will appeal to anyone who has ever yearned to write or to meet the men and women who do.
Review
"From watching James Dickey proposition his girlfriend to having Paul Bowles serve him a kind of hashish candy, Michael Mewshaw seems to have seen it all during his writing life. An excellent writer of novels and essays, Mewshaw now turns his hand to his Me-Mores (as his friend Gore Vidal calls them). Not surprisingly, he reveals himself to be an adept collector of stories and a generous illustrator of the literary life in all its glory, absurdity, and humiliation. Mewshaw shows how he found his way to writing after growing up in 'America's first suburban slum.' He shows how George Garrett helped him transform from an aspiring writer to the author of two novels with an M.A. and a Ph.D. And he shows us intimate portraits of William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene and Gore Vidal. Mewshaw gets everything right—the physical descriptions, the subtle one-upmanship played by various writers, the curious things that happen outside the public eye and off the historic record, and the struggle that becoming a writer entails. Do I Owe You Something? is at once a valuable history of our time and a moving portrait of its author." Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)