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Memoirs
Memoirs
Memoirs
Audiobook13 hours

Memoirs

Written by Tennessee Williams

Narrated by P.J. Ochlan

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

()

About this audiobook

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media-though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams's candor about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such revelations by America's greatest living playwright were called "a raw display of private life" by the New York Times Book Review. As it turns out, Williams's look back at his life is not quite so scandalous as it once seemed; he recalls his childhood in Mississippi and St. Louis, his prolonged struggle as a "starving artist," the "overnight" success of The Glass Menagerie in 1945, the death of his long-time companion Frank Merlo in 1962, and his confinement to a psychiatric ward in 1969 and subsequent recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, all with the same directness, compassion, and insight that epitomize his plays.

And, of course, Memoirs is filled with Williams's amazing friends from the worlds of stage, screen, and literature as he often hilariously, sometimes fondly-sometimes not-remembers them: Laurette Taylor, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Vivian Leigh, Carson McCullers, Anna Magnani, Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Taylor, and Tallulah Bankhead, to name a few.

Contains mature themes.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 21, 2019
ISBN9781977349798
Memoirs
Author

Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi won Pulitzer Prizes for his dramas, A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Other plays include The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and Night of the Iguana. He also wrote a number of one-act plays, short stories, poems and two novels, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and Moishe and the Age of Reason. He died in 1983 at the age of 72.

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Reviews for Memoirs

Rating: 3.583333275 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

60 ratings7 reviews

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  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This review is of the audible version. The narrator's fake southern accent was simply atrocious! I was unable to make it through the first chapter. Looked up the narrator. Sure enough, he's from Long Island! I will read it to myself.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Some detergent flowed through these pages, but it's still fun to see his perspective on what happened. Williams is an icon. He went where no [other] 'man' had gone before.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Studying Tenessee Williams at college, doing his plays, this was very useful! Very entertaining too

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The Memoirs by Tennessee Williams were clearly written for publication by an author self-confident enough to write whatever he liked in whatever way he liked, seemingly with disdain for the reader or even the publisher. However, this makes the book very personal. The book is chronological, but not evenly spread out. Likewise, the book doesn't aim at accuracy or completeness. The Memoirs could be read as a supplement to a biography but aren't detailed enough to be read instead of a biography. Reading these Memoirs one gets the feeling the author enjoyed looking back on his life en enjoyed writing about it so openly and explicitely, which was possible in the early 1970s when the book was published. Here is a writer who enjoys telling his story, and so many of his romances and sexual escapades find their ways into the book, including his long-term relationship with Frank Merlo. On the other hand, the book is somewhat disappointing for readers who are expecting to read more about Williams career as a writer, his ideas and inspiration, literary friendships, etc., although it is worth mentioning that there is a lot about his friendship with Carson McCullers and readers interested in that author might need to refer to these pages. It is therefore questionable why Penguin Books published thje book as a Modern Classic, probably more as a tribute to the upcoming openly gay writing of the 1970s that the literary merits of the work.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I absolutely loved this memoir. The great thing about a memoir, you can talk about anything you want and anything you feel was important in your life. To Tennessee his personal life was what shaped him as a writer. I would cry when he talked about the mental illness his sister and mother had, and then I would laugh when he talked about all of the sexual positions he tried last night with the young prostitute. I definately have a deeper appreciation and understanding of his writing.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Since Williams' Memoirs are the first and only memoirs I have ever read, I don't know how they hold up as memoirs. However, I do know that I fully enjoyed reading them! The sordid tales of his life were beyond interesting to me. I especially enjoyed the one in which a stranger came up to him on the street and shouted, "Hey! You gave me crabs last night!" How wild! While I did enjoy the stories and the book as a whole, it was a little hard to connect everything together sometimes. Often times, I would begin to see a timeline emerge and all of a sudden he would throw in a non sequitor from left field.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A tell-all book that doesn't.Not even much insight in how and why he wrote his plays.Pass on it.