Beg, Borrow, Steal

Beg, Borrow, Steal

I just finished reading a wonderful “memoir” about the writer’s life. I say that in quotes because the book is not a typical memoir but rather a collection of essays written by the author and pubished as a column in The Times Supplement. The book is called “Beg, Borrow, Steal: the Writer’s Life,” written by Michael Greenberg. In wonderful bite-sized pieces, Greenberg, who never went to college or formally studied literature or journalism, chronicles his journey through heartache and setbacks to become a writer. He’s a very good writer and I highly recommend it.

Here are some comments from another review, written by Adam Kirsch in Tablet: “Greenberg undoubtedly belongs in a book by Saul Bellow. “As I saw it, the real sacrifice was on the part of those who had to toe the line and forswear a free-style existence,” Greenberg writes of his adolescent self, cleverly alluding both to the title of his column and to that famous freelance, Augie March: “’First to knock, first admitted,’ in Saul Bellow’s words. ‘Sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.’” Following this creed, Greenberg never went to college, choosing instead to run away from home as a teenager, then prowl New York and the world in search of the writer’s elixir, experience. Yet in Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life—the terrific new collection of Greenberg’s “Freelance” columns, just published by Other Press—he is mainly concerned to show the downside of experience. The book is a chronicle, not of failure exactly, but of constant struggle—against the slipperiness of the writer’s vocation, against the psychological burdens of family and Jewishness, but most straightforwardly, as the title suggests, the struggle just to earn a living.”