Volume 54, Number 2 · February 15, 2007
'The Not Returning Part of It'
By Janet Malcolm
Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life
by Allen Shawn
Viking, 267 pp., $24.95
Maxim Gorky wrote of Chekhov that 'in the presence of Anton Pavlovich, everyone felt an unconscious desire to be simpler, more truthful, more himself.' The persona that emerges from Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life, Allen Shawn's book about his life as a phobic, produces a similar effect. Shawn's writing generates an atmosphere of almost palpable authenticity; one reads the book in a kind of trance of trust, certain that the writer is incapable of pretense and falseness. To learn that he grew up in a household ruled by pretense and falseness is to hear the shoe drop. Yes, of course. Those who have been lied to are especially prone to compulsive truth-telling.
Review, 2984 words
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