Although Patricia Bosworth’s new memoir is set in the 1950s, it is urgent and essential reading, especially for young women. Parts of it are also terrifying ... in charting her young adulthood during the 1950s — and examining the suicides of her brother and father — she paints a harrowing portrait of a decade that, because of the recent election, is no longer a quaint horror in the distant past ... Choosing to write rather than perform, she has excelled at memoir, biography and literary journalism ... bravely bearing witness to the perils of an illegal abortion — at a time when a new political regime threatens to end women’s hard-won reproductive rights.
The material she has to work with is, once again, ridiculously good ... Ms. Bosworth does not recount these stories as a striding march through Manhattan and Hollywood. The Men in My Life attends just as fully to loneliness and darkness, to the slivers of dread that prickled her psyche. There is a good deal of talk in this book about what she calls 'the bereaved creature inside me' ... She writes deliciously, in this memoir, about her sexual awakening, her pursuit of ravishment ... This book’s anecdotes are struck like matches, and there are small glowing moments, but no warming narrative fire results. The tone is detached, and the many cameos by the talented and famous are not sharply drawn ... There is something impacted at this book’s core. It’s a survivor’s memoir, a book by an adult child of alcoholics, and Ms. Bosworth evokes her suffering with patience and care. But the psychological knots this book presents are not profitably untangled.
We tend to think of the 1950s as a puritanical era. For Patricia Bosworth—a one-time actress and the biographer of Montgomery Clift, Diane Arbus and Marlon Brando—they were anything but. Her life was a dramatic saga of ambition, sex, love, affairs, heartbreak and abortion. She courageously reveals it all in The Men in My Life ... The sexual revolution and feminism would come along and change everything. But before they did, women like Patricia Bosworth refused to conform.
...In her graceful biographies, Patricia Bosworth has written with sensitive restraint about artists whose self-destructive lives often attract lurid coverage, including Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus...So it’s a pleasure but not entirely a surprise to report that in her new memoir Bosworth writes about her own life with the same nonjudgmental candor ... Bosworth provides colorful snapshots of the Studio’s starry membership in its heyday, from Ben Gazzara and Elaine Stritch (at the time a boozy couple) to Steve McQueen (on a motorcycle, naturally) and Arthur Penn (acidly depicted as a sadistic bully). Despite the big-name cameos, this is an unsentimental account of life as a journeyman actor ... Self-pity is all too common in memoirs of family dysfunction, but Bosworth eschews it in favor of self-knowledge. Her lucid, low-key prose is nothing like Mary Karr’s salty Texas snap, but The Men in My Life shares with The Liars’ Club the distinction of describing a turbulent coming-of-age with the nuance and acuity that real lives deserve.
Manhattan in the 1950s was an extraordinary place, particularly in the ecosystem where Bosworth found herself, roiled with changing social mores and artistic experimentation. A lifelong diarist, it appears that Bosworth can pluck verbatim exchanges from her journals, which makes her story deliciously vivid, if not exactly precisely crafted ... Bosworth’s coming-of-age tale is emblematic of the times, when women were poised to take control of their own bodies, yet still confined by restrictive cultural norms and legal hurdles."3
Occasionally The Men in My Life gets slowed down by Bosworth’s recollections of luminaries who appeared in her orbit ... As readers, we know early on about the deep losses in Bosworth’s life, and we know she survived and went on to have an illustrious career on the stage and in publishing. That deprives the book of any natural tension ... It seems unlikely that The Men in My Life will go down as the most important book in Bosworth’s career. But perhaps, privately, it will be the most important one in her life ... n the end, every tear Bosworth shed while writing this book was worthwhile.
