A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel.
At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying and failing to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness."
- ISBN10 0140076808
- ISBN13 9780140076806
- Publish Date 28 November 1985 (first published 31 October 1974)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 6 December 1991
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 352
- Language English