Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life

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More About This Book

Overview

In Beg, Borrow, Steal Michael Greenberg regales us with his wry and vivid take on the life of a writer of little means trying to practice his craft or simply stay alive. He finds himself doctoring doomed movie scripts; selling cosmetics from an ironing board in front of a women's department store; writing about golf, a game he has never played; and botching his debut as a waiter in a posh restaurant.

Central characters include Michael's father, whose prediction that Michael's "scribbling" wouldn't get him on the subway almost came true; his artistic first wife, whom he met in a Greenwich Village high school; and their son who grew up on the Lower East Side, fluent in the language of the street and in the language of the parlor. Then there are Greenberg's unexpected encounters: a Holocaust survivor who on his deathbed tries to leave Michael his fortune; a repentant communist who confesses his sins; a man who becomes a woman; a Chilean filmmaker in search of his past; and rats who behave like humans and cease to live underground.

Hilarious and bittersweet, Greenberg's stories invite us into a world where the familial, the literary, the tragic and the mundane not only speak to one another, but deeply enjoy the exchange.

Editorial Reviews

Edmund White
Most of the unconditional admirers of New York are from elsewhere. People like me, who grew up in the Midwest in the 1950s, couldn't wait to trade in "the provinces" for the Big Apple, and half a century later we're still besotted with its incomparable vitality. But Michael Greenberg, a native New Yorker, loves the city as a child loves a parent, and in its honor he has put together a collection of tightly written, incisive chapters, each another tessera or tile in a big mosaic—and like tesserae, they are all placed at a slightly different angle to the light.
—The New York Times
Juliet Wittman
The short pieces in Beg, Borrow, Steal are in the tradition of the literary-journalistic essays that Europeans call feuilletons. Although flexible, this form requires skill and concision, and Michael Greenberg uses it brilliantly. Personal experience is at the center of each piece, but none is solipsistic; the tone is understated and ironic, and every essay contains a hard-won glimmer of insight.
—The Washington Post
More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews
Publishers Weekly
In these 45 thoughtfully crafted short essays written for London's Times Literary Supplement from 2003 to 2009, Greenberg (Hurry Down Sunshine) touches on his decades of trying to make good as a writer in New York City. Greenberg starts with early memories of growing up in Brooklyn, where he opted out of joining his father's scrap-metal business, instead dropping out of school in the early 1970s in search of a “blunt exotic experience” in Argentina and New York's Lower East Side. He ended up strapped with a young family of two children and faced years of plying odd jobs, like driving a cab, giving Spanish lessons, selling cosmetics on the street and ghost writing, all the while trying to write his novel. He fashions an anecdote for each of these experiences, in gently self-deprecating prose, such as writing for the movies and working the stock market, both to some success despite his naïveté. He tapped into an enthusiastic group of dachshund owners when he had to find another home for his child-nipping Eli, a troublesome pooch with a “disgraceful domed head”; he devotes chapters to the Negro Burial Ground and the paupers' cemetery on Hart Island, in New York City. As well, he offers touching reflections on the life of novelist William Herrick and editor Ted Solotaroff, and chronicles some funny run-ins with New Yorkers of all stripes. These are graceful ponderings by a deeply sympathetic soul, a consummate New Yorker and terrific writer. (Sept.)
Library Journal
Greenberg, a native New Yorker and author of the well-received Hurry Down Sunshine, collects 45 short essays that originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. Greenberg's editor gave him simple instructions: for each piece, spill a drop of blood, give it a sense of urgency, and do not exceed 1200 words. Greenberg skillfully meets his editor's requirements and seems to have carefully and artfully selected words and constructed sentences for maximum impact, much like a haiku, to which he likened his strict parameters. His narratives, which mostly take place in New York City, include an entertaining cast of characters and span from his youth in the 1970s through marriage and raising his own children to the near present day, with the underlying theme of a writer eking out a living by any means possible and, in turn, living a full life. VERDICT Each piece is about four pages long, which makes this a quick and easy read, especially for subway or bus commuters; recommended for readers who enjoy memoirs and essays.—Mark Alan Williams, Library of Congress, Washington, DC\
Kirkus Reviews
Times Literary Supplement columnist Greenberg follows his acclaimed debut memoir (Hurry Down Sunshine, 2008) with a collection of tight, readable essays. The author's refreshing approach avoids the self-indulgent and solipsistic impulses that often characterize autobiographical writing. In a concise format-modeled on that of his column for TLS, which, the author writes, "seemed as strict as that of a haiku"-Greenberg offers concentrated excursions into a wide variety of subjects, including film, literature, Jewish identity, immigration, racism, family conflict, the wildlife in Central Park, tenement housing, New York City's rat problem ("Dozens of them were hanging out like teenagers, copulating, browsing, completely at ease") and even the politics of transgendered sexuality. Although the narrative is structured in episodic fragments, Greenberg does an excellent job keeping them unified via his plainspoken, unpretentious tone. Most chapters read like anecdotes told among friends, yet at the same time the author creates poignant subtexts involving fundamental human values and emotions like love, desire, honesty and malice. In one essay, for instance, Greenberg recounts his days as an interpreter for Spanish-speaking defendants in a criminal court, and how this experience impacted his later compassion and sympathy as a juror in a case involving a janitor accused of selling drugs to students. In another, he relates the story of a tense friendship with a black man who implies that an uncomfortable number of black Americans harbor violent fantasies about killing whites. From odd jobs and family drama to political unrest in Argentina and the many pitfalls of memoir writing, Greenberg skillfullyexplores issues that range from the profoundly tragic to the delightfully funny. Succinct, entertaining personal narratives.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780307740670
  • Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
  • Publication date: 11/2/2010
  • Pages: 240
  • Sales rank: 714,463
  • Series: Vintage Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.17 (w) x 7.99 (h) x 0.71 (d)

Meet the Author

A native New Yorker, Michael Greenberg is the author of the memoir Hurry Down Sunshine (Other Press, 2008), published in sixteen countries and chosen as one of the best books of 2008 by Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, and Library Journal. He is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement. His writing has appeared in such varied places as O, The Oprah Magazine and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him. Life radiated from the central pulse of his scrap-metal yard; the world beyond it seemed to make him defensive and nervous. Self-conscious about his lack of formal education, he took my bookishness as a personal affront. “Which do you think is worth more,” he once asked me, “a commodity or some goddamn idea?”

Among the family, my violent fights with him were famous. The last one occurred when I was fifteen. I followed him around the apartment, taunting him with a line from my latest poem, “Which do you think is worth more, flesh or steel?” At the end of his rope, he took a wild swing at me. I dodged it easily, hearing the crush of bone as his fist hit the wall. I fled the apartment, and when I returned, three days later, his hand was in a cast. “You have guts, but no common sense,” he said. “One cancels out the other. A total waste.”

A week later, I moved away from home, supporting myself with a night job in a bookstore.

Nevertheless, when I was in my early twenties, driving a cab, with a newborn son at home, my father offered me a chance to join the family business. “You get all the major holidays,” he said. “You quit work every day at five. And to make a living you don’t have to be a genius.” He seemed hurt when I turned him down. “Those notebooks you scribble in won’t get you on the goddam subway,” he said. He was right, and during the lean years that followed I sometimes imagined that he was eyeing me with satisfaction.

Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing 1 – 4 of 3 Customer Reviews

  • Posted January 3, 2011

    more from this reviewer

    A writer's life? I can't figure out how he is a writer...

    I expected a gripping tale of the writer-as-artist's life...struggling, not being able to pay bills, the excitement of NYC. What I got was chapters that did not flow together (much less relate to what I had just read), odd stories about people, places, and things that had very little to do with - well - anything. I wish I could get my money back, plus timed served reading. I have this weird thing about reading books all the way through, trying to find some redeeming quality, but I couldn't. I was counting down the pages till I was through. Not recommended. Not at all.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

  • Posted February 21, 2010

    "Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of supression; if you hold down one thing you hold down the adjoining." The Adventures of Augie March, S. Bellow, 1953

    Wry and rueful, frequently wise, 'Beg, Borrow, Steal, A Writer's Life' is antidote to the bombastic self-advertisement and corruption of contemporary literary memoir. For admirers of 'Hurry Down Sunshine', 2008, Michael Greenberg's newest book will be a welcome, and less harrowing, return to the mind and milieu of a man who wrote so wrenchingly and well on his adolescent daughter's psychotic break. (The present volume gathers stories that earlier appeared in Greenberg's Freelance column for the Times Literary Supplement.)

    Like miniature portraits etched in ivory, Greenberg's stories beg to be carried in a pocket by the heart. Economical of language yet generous in spirit, they are finely drawn in a plainspoken style that is both taut and selectively terse. Set beyond fame's obliterating currency, his subjects move about the margins of a storied city's vaporizing glare. Greenberg's quietly powerful tales are illuminated from within by lives lived inside the author's circle of acquaintance. They ring with the truth of one about whom it may be suspected has outlasted his darkest fears and deepest disappointments, yet still takes nothing for granted.

    Sometimes family, often Jews, mostly New Yorkers, writers and minor celebrities mingle here with tailors and salvage dealers, bohemian aristocrats and public housing tenants. The unexpected and the overlooked are the stuff of these tales, told from the inside out.

    A blockbuster film to his credit, a criminal judge interviews the author when he is called for jury duty. An Auschwitz alumnus leaves an ambiguous, Gogolian legacy the author must share on the arrival of a surprise beneficiary. A chance meeting at a cocktail party affords a once powerful editor an opportunity for reflection, which seeming to have outlived his legend, he misses, furnishing the author an ambivalent epiphany; he'd rejected Greenberg's early fictional efforts. Elsewhere, an idle hour in the Lower East Side's Tenement Museum inspires a deceptively mundane travelogue that metamorphoses into a searing meditation on the stark emotional legacy of a grandfather's rise from "shtetl nobody."

    Greenberg's habit of writing as close to home as he does to the bone instigates a few of the scenes animating these tales, as when his wife Pat brings a friend home to dinner. Georgina, Greenberg writes, had been "scoured of maleness by hormone infusions and sex reassignment surgery... and looked oddly ageless ... with a touch of smugness, justifiable perhaps in one who had partially succeeded in overturning one of Nature's most intractable laws."

    Feeling like the proverbial fifth wheel, Greenberg obnoxiously begins-notebook in one hand, bourbon in the other-- to "interview" Georgina when Pat erupts, tracing a perilous fault line in the couple's marriage. The story continues after Georgina has gone and Greenberg has asked Pat "what she thought had motivated Georgina to do what she did to herself." It's writing with power out of all scale to its brevity. It works by the author's peerless handling of the tension bristling between disclosure and restraint, self appraisal and elision. "[T]he ultimate freedom." Pat goes on, "I am what I say I am. Not what I was born..."

    If a deep, arresting poignancy is a regular feature of these stories, the author's clear, unblinking gaze and heroically stealthy economy have left no budget for sentimentality. More, please, Mr. Greenberg. Soon.

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    Posted November 23, 2010

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    Posted January 27, 2010

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