A Life Discarded
148 Diaries Found in the Trash
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Alexander Masters, the bestselling author of Stuart: A Life Backwards, asks you to join him in celebrating an unknown and important life left on the scrap heap
In 2001, 148 tattered and mold-covered notebooks were discovered lying among broken bricks in a skip on a building site in Cambridge. Tens of thousands of pages were filled to the edges with urgent handwriting. They were a small part of an intimate, anonymous diary, starting in 1952 and ending half a century later, a few weeks before the books were thrown out. Over five years, the award-winning biographer Alexander Masters uncovers the identity and real history of their author, with an astounding final revelation.
A Life Discarded is a true, shocking, poignant, often hilarious story of an ordinary life. The author of the diaries, known only as 'I,' is the tragicomic patron saint of everyone who feels their life should have been more successful. Part thriller, part love story, part social history, A Life Discarded is a biographical detective story that unfolds with the suspense of a mystery but has all the warmth, respect, humor, and dazzling originality that made Masters's Stuart: A Life Backwards such a beloved book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With surprise, humor, and quiet insights that never seem glib, biographer Masters (Stuart: A Life Backwards) pursues an extraordinary question: what is the value of an ordinary life? With wonderful excerpts, original handwriting, photographs, sketches, and extravagant speculation, Masters brings to vivid life the 148 anonymous diaries that come into his possession, and constructs a richly compelling narrative around his experience of discovering their owner. The narrative of the diary author's obsessions, ambitions, great loves, and disappointments is scaffolded with mysteries and discoveries that keep Masters revising his initial assumptions. He employs graphologists, private detectives, concert pianists, and judicious trespassing to understand his subject, but enjoys the anonymity, "sense of quiet universality," and truth captured in this scrupulously documented existence. Despite some shortcomings, Masters's subject has produced something impressive and unprecedented: "a forty-million-word description of being alive." As much a guided tour of Masters's own mind as that of his subject, this book is funny, original, astonishing, and poignant in its revelations that, in biography as in life, there are no tidy answers but there is an incredible value in the ordinary, in "the resonance of tiny things" and "triumphs of a scribbled-down life."
