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Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies

Paperback / ISBN-13: 9780349139401

Price: £10.99

ON SALE: 1st September 2016

Genre: Biography & True Stories / Biography: General

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An intimate yet frank biography of Gore Vidal, one of the most accomplished, visible and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s biography probes behind the glittering surface of Vidal’s colourful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well – a virtual Who’s Who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt on down.

The life of Gore Vidal was an amazingly full one; a life of colourful incident, famous people and lasting achievements that calls out for careful evocation and examination. Through Jay Parini’s eyes and words comes an accessible, entertaining story that puts the life and times of one of the great American figures of the post-war era into context, that introduces the author to a generation who didn’t know him before and looks behind-the-scenes at the man and his work in frank ways never possible before his death. Parini, provided with unique access to Vidal’s life and his papers, excavates buried skeletons, but never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts.

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Reviews

Riveting
Herald
a marvellous new biography . . . a portrait that is both affectionate and balanced
The Economist
He has painted a portrait that is by turns shocking, witty and very funny - just like the much-missed man himself
Evening Standard
In a good year for biography, the life I enjoyed the most, a gossipy window on a great American, is Jay Parini's life of Gore Vidal, Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies
Robert McCrum, Observer
As much an intimate memoir as a scholarly biography
Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
This biography, filled with glittering names and acerbic wit, faithfully evokes the dangerous charm whose chilly dazzle even his melancholy last years could not quite extinguish
Daily Mail
Writer, pundit, bon viveur, frequenter of chat-show couches, Vidal will be remembered by his contemporaries, Parini is sure, "as a meteor who streaked through the night skies, with a fantail of sparks". He is less certain about future generations. "Will they read him? It's impossible to know." With this fine biography, he has done his part in ensuring they will
Independent