Not a review, but an issue that cam up while reading this book that I'm not quite sure of what to make. I read this novel after reading Shields's recent memoir "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead" and noticed that there are about ten times where the exact same passages exist in both books. For example, Shields struggled with acne as a teen, and gives a rather vivid description of it in his memoir. The narrator in the novel has the same struggle, and the description of it is exactly the same, word for word, as the other book. The same examples exist describing the fathers of both characters.Can an artist plagiarize themselves? I realize that one is fiction and the other nonfiction, but this seems lazy to me. There was a sixteen year gap between when these two books were written (the novel was written first). I'm all for taking parts of actual life and injecting it into fiction, and have done so myself many times. Anyway, I'm interested in what other writers think about this.
