Sherry Chandler

An unreliable narrator

Well, I was going to start today by posting some lovely poetic ode to spring, which begins at 7:43 a.m. EDT (yeah, right), and I for one am ready to celebrate that moment of the sun’s crossing the equator, dividing day and night into equal slices. It’s been a long winter.

But the poem will have to wait because I got distracted, and amused, by this from Hadley Freeman in The Guardian (causing me at least one more time to have to put George W. Bush in my tag line):

There have probably been more English literature PhD papers written on “the unreliable narrator” than the sexuality of Shakespeare, but the literary trope has a less straightforward appeal in publishing. The former and much missed (by comedians) president of the United States, George W Bush, is to receive a rumoured $7m advance for his autobiography, or what will otherwise be referred to as $5m less than Bill Clinton got for his. Fortunately, George knows someone who will be able to sympathise – his good lady wife who has reportedly received a mere $1.6m for her memoirs, almost $6.5m less than Hillary and less even than her mother-in-law got back in the last century.

Meanwhile, with the kind of synchronised timing that makes one think there is a divine plan after all, their literary superior Britney Spears has reportedly rejected pleas from three publishers to write her autobiography. If only George was a good guy, we could have turned this into a “what a world of skewed values we live in” piece.

Now, in the interests of clarity, George’s book isn’t strictly speaking an autobiography but rather a series of explanations of decisions he has taken, including why he gave up drinking and why he decided Dick Cheney was a good idea, without having to bother with that boring crap called “narrative”. Think of it, as one suspects George does, as the York Notes to his autobiography.

I’m going to leap to the conclusion that York Notes are the British equivalent of Cliff Notes. Unfortunately, as Hadley points out, the narrator of The Dubya Diaries will be all too reliable:

Also, I’d wager that George will do a lot less lying in his book than one finds in the average autobiography simply because he’s not lying – he is perhaps the last person in the world who actually believes what he says.

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BTW, The Guardian has a poll: Was Obama a hit on Leno? Go vote if you will. I don’t know how it’s going because I can’t vote. I never watch Leno.

And just in passing, I’ll mention that it’s the 157^th anniversary of the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And here’s Obama’s book deal.