As to why people like Joseph Lelyveld are writing memoirs, I think they're just catching on the coattails of the trend.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

Americans and their desire to be novelists, the American novel should be listed in medical dictionaries alongside Megalomania and Obsessional Neuroses.

how the French can talk. About a stew, about a fly on the parapet, about death, about anything.

I think we're much more eager to know about our parents than we were in the seventies.

We write out of revenge against reality, to dream and enter the lives of others.

I think it's one of the reasons I wrote my book later in life. My parents didn't have these extreme alternations of conduct. They were very sweet to me.