Looking over what I had written, I became hopeful. The book was strange, true, comic, and unexpected – that was what mattered most. I wanted people to believe it and like it, and to find something of themselves expressed in it.Paul Theroux calls My Other Life “an imaginary memoir...driven by my alter ego's murmur of 'what if?'”. As this is the first of Theroux's books that I've read, I had no way to know what might have been based on his own life or not. But, after googling this book upon completion, it would seem that this fictional autobiography follows his own life exactly: a writer named Paul Theroux is born in Medford, Massachusetts, goes to college, joins the Peace Corps, moves to Malawi, marries a British woman, has two sons, moves to Singapore, moves to England, gets divorced, and moves to America. Along the way, Theroux becomes rather famous for his novels (Mosquito Coast) and his travel books (The Great Railway Bazaar) and appears to live happily ever after.
Each chapter in My Other Life is set in a different locale and reads like a short story. Theroux meets incredible characters and sometimes he's in awe of them and sometimes he feels superior to them, but always, Theroux himself is the most interesting person in the room; he is definitely the protagonist of his own tales. Consistently, the writing is interesting, and it's obvious why he has made a mark as a travel writer, as he captures an African leprosorium:
Ever since I had arrived the night before, the leper village had been audible. It smoldered and crackled beneath the trees at the foot of the priests' hill. There were always voices and shouts and laughter, the continual cockcrows of the Africans called tambala, and the thump of the pounding of pestles in mortars as the women made ufa, the corn flour that was one of the village staples. The village was also the smell of wood smoke and that other, obscurer odor, of decay, of human bodies, the smell of disease and frailty and death, which was also the smell of dirt.And the Far East experience for an ex-pat American during the Vietnam War years:
Singapore was an island of party-givers, everyone drumming up business or being social...They were all strangers to me. They seemed not exotic but remote and foolish, inhabiting a world so different from mine that I had nothing to say to them: and they did not know me. I hated them for their parties; I also thought: Please invite me.And the London night life:
It was important in London to leave a party or start home before the public houses closed, for just after eleven o'clock the streets were thronged with drunks – all men, their faces wolfish and pale, yelling at passing cars or else staggering and scrapping. Some of them loitered, looking ravenous, eating chips with greasy fingers out of pouches of old newspapers. All over London these men, turned out of the pubs, were pissing in doorways.My Other Life is often funny – like the beginning chapter about Uncle Hal, which made me think this was going to be a hilarious romp of a book – and sometimes touching – like with the strange chapter in which he meets his doppelganger; an older man who warns Theroux of the heartbreaking consequences of his looming divorce. Failure is a sort of funeral, and a person fleeing a collapsed marriage is both the corpse and the mourner.
I found it strange when he incorporated real people into his “fiction” – with an unflattering portrayal of Anthony Burgess (with an even more unflattering portrayal of Theroux's ex-wife in this section, which prompted her to write an irate letter to The New Yorker after it first appeared in its pages as a short story) and a surreal dinner at which the Queen was present (and this story apparently caused a diplomatic fuss when Theroux – who has never actually met the Queen – had her uttering some decidedly non-politically correct opinions). While reading, I could never be sure what was based on fact and what was entirely fictive.
Theroux is unafraid to make himself look bad and spends some time mocking his own celebrity (and especially when he's trying to parlay his celebrity into sexual favours – was he really this much of a cad?) And he spends a lot of time writing about writing, and even when he's writing about reading, it feels like he's talking about his own work:
A person reading a wonderful book is overwhelmed by feelings of inspiration and ignorance, bafflement and belief, and becomes a sort of dogged, dazzled apostle, limping after the priestly figure of the writer.So much of what I learned about the real Paul Theroux came after I finished My Other Life, and my favourite discovery was the reaction of his older brother (highbrow author Alexander Theroux), who reviewed the book for Boston Magazine, writing, in part:
Nobody I know has written so many books (20 novels, 10 travel books) with so little serious critical recognition to show for it... We in the family don't mind his affected gentility, his smug and self-important airs, his urgent insistence that he's a friend of lords and ladies, and only laugh at the fame he courts.Love that – Alexander goes on to share facts about his brother's digestive issues (he eats prunes! Every day!) and I can only imagine what family feud led to this review (because the Theroux family doesn't really make an appearance in this book). In the end, My Other Life was a rather strange experience: like I said, it reads like a collection of short stories rather than a cohesive novel (which is likely what any of our life stories look like anyway), and taken as individual units, each story was interesting or amusing in some way. I see many reviewers saying that they appreciate seeing some of the facts behind what they've already read of Theroux and I'm obliged to go at that backwards: having read this “imaginary memoir”, I'm looking forward to reading the books that Theroux is more famous for – he can certainly write, that's for sure.
