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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

Michael Mewshaw

Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal

An entertaining, intimate look at Gore Vidal, a man who prided himself on being difficult to know.

Detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know: This is the calcified, public image of Gore Vidal—one the man himself was fond of reinforcing. “I’m exactly as I appear,” he once said of himself. “There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages—and while “Gore” can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely. Sparkling, often hilarious, and filled with spicy anecdotes about expat life in Italy, Sympathy for the Devil is an irresistible inside account of a man who was himself—faults and all—impossible to resist. As enlightening as it is entertaining, it offers a unique look at a figure many only think they know. Michael Mewshaw is an author of eleven novels and eight books of nonfiction, and works frequently as a travel writer, investigative reporter, book reviewer, and tennis reporter. His novel Year of the Gun was made into a film of the same name by John Frankenheimer.

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Book Published 2015-01-01 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Comments

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL reads like the wind and is instantly engaging. Michael Mewshaw presents a carefully nuanced portrait of Gore Vidal--his imperiousness as well as his less-publicized acts of generosity and loyalty. It's the sort of focussed, sober study Vidal himself never would have had the modesty or patience to write.

Michael Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid.

[Mewshaw's] Vidal is brilliantly alive, raunchy, as easily offended as he is quick to give offense—and then, finally, desperately self-hating, vituperative, and alone.

Michael Mewshaw knew Gore Vidal well for many decades, and his account of their friendship, largely centered on the Roman years, is evocative, gossipy, entertaining, and moving. I knew Vidal myself, as a friend, and he?s truly here, in all his ruined glory: a massive and complicated figure who bestrode the American century during the postwar era like no other writer.