While living in southern France in 1972, Michael Mewshaw engineered a meeting with Graham Greene. The pair became fast friends and corresponded for the next twenty years. My Man in Antibes is a portrait of what it was like to eat, drink, and gossip with one of the most revered--and complicated--authors of the twentieth century.
Mewshaw’s surge of details never flags, by turns bold and lurid ... Such particulars are irresistible, and My Man teems with them ... I confess it’s hard to read “My Man” without feeling that Mewshaw has something to prove. What in fact emerges from this dishy, sometimes showy, often tragicomic chronicle is Mewshaw’s overpowering drive to advance a writing career, and (no surprise) Greene’s inscrutably conflicted, shape-shifting relationship to — well, everything.
What emerges is an up-close portrait of Greene, with many juicy details ... This is a rare, firsthand look at the one of the 20th century's greatest authors.
Mewshaw finds much in Greene's life and work to admire and emulate, along with human frailty, and he conveys the ups and downs of their relationship with genuine intimacy.
