My Life as a Man

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strinberg—a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

The spirited story of a young writer's attempt to free himself from a woman who won't let go.

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strinberg—a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

Award-winning author Philip Roth has made a career of confronting the heartbreaking dissolution of relationships, the absurdity of sexual neuroses, and the downside of his own literary fame. Many of his readers believe that Roth has been merely writing his own story for nearly fifty years. However, the author refuses to offer such speculators any simple answers, saying of his characters, It's all me. Nothing is me."