Time Out of Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels, 1961-1995 Hardback - 1999

Leonard Michaels tells us that he began keeping a journal because he had no one to talk to about his troubled early marriage, which ended in his wife's suicide. Over the years, he reveals here, he has found many things easier to confide to paper than to friends and family. Now, with the publication of his journals, we follow this distinguished writer's progress. As we see the world anew through his eyes, we also gain rare insight into what it means to be a writer.

Time out of Mind contains the sometimes carefully crafted, sometimes emotionally raw musings of a man who has difficulty reconciling himself to the world. He reports on the conversations of others, finding, instead of meaning, people's inability to communicate. He gets drawn into the dramas of people's lives, and feels guilty for their misfortunes. He tries to please, and is misunderstood. And he sees, with a vividness few of us do, the beauty and the strangeness in the world.

Often hilarious and always riveting, Time out of Mind describes Michaels as friend, lover, husband, and father. With surprising dramatic intensity, it captures the character of the times, beginning in the early sixties, when he was a young writer living in Greenwich Village, and continuing through the political mayhem of the Vietnam era during his student days at Ann Arbor, then on into the seventies and eighties in Berkeley, where Michaels was for many years a professor of English literature.

Some of these entries have been published before -- in The New Yorker, The Three-Penny Review, and in Michael's autobiographical novella Sylvia. Read as a whole, they form a spellbinding narrative, intimate and compulsive, that makes clear why Michaels hasbeen hailed as a master of observation, and as one of the most talented writers of our time.