the Memoir genre is mostly lacking. Isn't anyone reading memoir?

* Don't Tell Dad
* A Memoir
* By Peter Fonda
* Paperback | 0671018094 |



The cover of my copy boasts that Peter Fonda has "written this entirely by himself!".

Lucky we are that he did not choose writing as a career then. Jane Fonda, with a similar background as an actress, has written a memoir that is infinitely more interesting.

To be fair, the beginning, about his childhood, has some good passages.

Most of the book is about his love life (compared to this, President Sarkozy is a paragon of monogamy). First I thought it was because he was writing about his student days, but it didn't seem to be getting better.

My impression is that he wrote because he had been offered over 2 million dollars to do so, and did not have much more of a reason. He wrote about himself, yet did not want to write about anything that really mattered to him-- the paradox of selling your memoirs while protecting your privacy .

The one thing that really interested me, of course, was what he would be writing about "Easy Rider".

Needless to say, this was dealt with in less details that his love affairs, but it did contain one gem.

Did anybody ever wonder about the scene with the rednecks at the cafe, just before they were all killed by some of the citizenry?

I always wondered how they had found such good actors that were looking so convincingly mean .
Fonda reveals in the book that they were working on a very small buget, so the restaurant was a real one; as for the actors, they just asked some of the patrons to play a scene with them, telling them that the three bikers had raped a white girl, and filmed what they got!

This one bit made it worth the money I spent on the book.

"A Long Way Gone: memoirs of a boy soldier" by Ishmael Beah. The story of a boy soldier caught in war torn Sierra Leone.

there seems to be several fiction books suggested or commented about on these nonfiction forums