Too Good To Be True: A Memoir (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
I guess I'm the perfect audience for this book -- a writer who hasn't had any of the acclaim or success of Anastas who can indulge in endless scheudenfreude as Benjamin details the misery of the results. I seem to have an affinity for writers named Benjamin who hit the wall with their fiction and turn to memoir to keep those royalty checks flowing -- I also liked Benjamin Cheever's Selling Ben Cheever, about his year working entry-level jobs when his third novel didn't sell. Still, it seems like this Ben protests too much and for too long, as he catalogues his debts and depressions and disappointments and romantic debacles. Still, for all the writers out there who have drawers packed with manuscripts, suffering in the belief that a couple novels in print would be paradise, Too Good to Be True is a guaranteed balm. Compelling. Addictive. Mysterious. I read it in one night. But......so much is left out. I was left wondering, wondering. How to connect the dots. Who really was this person at the heart of the story? I was rooting for him. I wanted him to succeed, to get well (?), to pull out of the tail spin. And yet....and yet who is Benjamin Anastas really? Its a mystery. A mystery with an invisible man at the core. A man who cannot see or own his actions or his actual SELF, though he spends so much time and agonized energy staring deeply AT himself. Oddly enough I read the book because the author stated in a magazine blurb that HIS favorite book was Thomas Merton's Seven Story Mountain, which has long been one of mine and you just generally don't come across a fellow Mertonite. But again, more of a puzzle. Still. Addictive. And interesting. And beautifully written. Personally I think a Jungian might help him.
What do You think about Too Good To Be True: A Memoir (2012)?
Disturbing like a train-wreck. Beautiful writing! An absolute page-turner.
—britannia
Uneven. Some of the chapters worked, and others floundered.
—neehmat
Tried to read but could not keep my interest
—alicia
