His Life as A Writer

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"With autobiography, there's always another text, a countertext, if you will, to the one presented. It's probably the most manipulative of all literary forms."

-- Nathan Zuckerman in "The Facts"

They met in 1956. He was teaching freshman composition at the University of Chicago. She was a blue-eyed blonde he'd first noticed waitressing nearby -- "a virtual ringer," as he would later write, "for the solid, energetic girl in the cheery movies about America's heartland."

The solidity and cheeriness were an illusion, as her husband-to-be sensed even then.

Divorced, the mother of two, four years older than Roth, she was in reality -- as he put it in "The Facts" -- "a small-town drunkard's angry daughter, a young woman already haunted by grim sexual memories and oppressed by an inextinguishable resentment over the injustices of her origins." Yet what drew his naive 23-year-old self to Maggie Williams, he came to believe, was precisely her worldly experience and victimization, the fact that she was not a nice Jewish girl from a familiar milieu.

"Your mistakes are how your life changes," Roth says now.

And how.

In the short run, his life changed immeasurably for the worse. His connection to Maggie descended into an unwanted, strife-scarred marriage. She tricked him into it by faking a pregnancy test with urine purchased from an indigent Chicago woman. This episode (which she later confessed to him, he reports) is one of the few that went straight into Roth's fiction without significant alteration. He didn't think he could improve on it.

His work changed as well. He had to get this train wreck fictionalized, he thought, simply to prove he'd survived. He started writing "My Life as a Man" in 1970, two years after Maggie's death -- but he couldn't get it right.

"I wrote it and stopped, wrote it and stopped," he says. "I couldn't solve it."

At the same time, he was working on a project that was far less fraught.