Palimpsest
A Memoir

This memoir covers the first forty years of the Vidal saga, alighting on his blind senator Grandpa, savage alcoholic mother, childhood sweetheart, licentious sex life, and endless hobnobbery with the most prominent actors and politicians of the period as he mosies up the Hollywood ladder and cosies......more

When I was a kid, Gore Vidal seemed a kind of mythical figure. I'd always known his name - ever since Lily Tomlin's Ernestine called him "Gory Veedal" - and I even read 'Myra Breckinridge' when I was a teen, but that only served to reinforce my image of him as... not quite real. Maybe that's why it......more

Of course one cannot help but be entertained by the pompous and regal Vidal, raised in privilege but excluded from his apparent birthright because he was not quite straight (he didn’t believe in the sexual orientation labels that became fashionable so I am treading gingerly). It didn’t matter what o......more

Possibly the best memoir ever written. Vidal is selfish and self-obsessed. He writes as if he holds court to the glittering socialites and society-types who swarm around him as he delicately wafts them away, and yet he is the one playing courtier - not a single name goes unchecked, not a single encou......more