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Magical Insight Into A Writer’s Life: Beg, Borrow, Steal
By Tammy | September 2, 2009
Some days you just need some time to decompress and escape your own world and perhaps, step into someone else’s. Sometimes it gives you a new perspective on your own life or just simply a chuckle that helps you step back into reality again.
In this recommended reading by Michael Greenberg, you’ll step into his life as a writer, learning that it’s not always easy to follow your dream but always worth it:
Beg, Borrow, Steal A Writer’s Life. Is it truly a work of art? Michael Greenberg follows his widely acclaimed memoir, Hurry Down Sunshine, with a collection of 45 auto-biographical essays. Set in New York City, the author depicts the life of a writer trying to succeed in painful and sometimes humorous ways. In these essays, written for London’s Times Literary Supplement, Greenberg involves us intimately in his long journey to establish a career as a writer. Greenberg squeezes concise stories connecting his beginnings growing up in New York with his continuous quest as a writer. Along the way, his adventures lead to this collection of personal accounts and the unique characters he meets along the way.
His opening essay begins with his violent conflicts with his father, a steel scrap dealer, leading to Greenberg leaving home in his teens to pursue his dreams. He leads us on an incredible voyage meeting unique and colorful characters along the way. From taking his high school sweetheart to Argentina during a civil war to a tailor who tried to leave him a small fortune, a coffee shop employee who was skimming the till in order to get married, a filmmaker named Sergio, a Central Park naturalist, a friend who encourages him to chop off a chickens head and then eat it, to a transgender man/woman his wife brings home for dinner.
Greenberg states, “… I worked at a series of dead-end jobs that stood no chance of threatening my fragile literary identity.” His painful and humorous odd jobs included: teaching Spanish, selling imitation cosmetics as a street peddler (and getting robbed in the process), moving furniture, driving a cab (where he was also robbed), failing as a waiter – first in a 5 star restaurant and then a tiny falafel one. He states, “ I couldn’t bear the prospect of pinning myself to a “career”.”
He writes powerfully about the unseen part of New York, from the nimiety of rats, “Dozens of them were hanging around like teenagers…”, to the discovery of the Negro Burial ground and a potter’s field on Hart Island. Greenberg’s description of New York, his adventures, and the characters he meets along the way are rendered with a penetrating humor and a magical insight. It is a true work of art.
Reviewed by:
Larry, Father of 3
This book will be available at Amazon.com on September 8. You can pre-order now: Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
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