Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage Book

It's a little disingenuous to imply that I've read this, as I only hopped around a bit, but, as if there was any doubt that Vonnegut spitting on a napkin would be deserving of the full five stars, I'm giving it to this book on the strength of one piece alone: the 'self-interview,' which was (apparently) first printed in the Paris Review.

Let's take a minute to examine the brilliance of a self-interview. Oh, wait! We don't have to, because Kurt has gone ahead and examined it for us:

Sentences spoken by writers, unless they have been written out first, rarely say what writers wish to say. Writers are unlucky speakers, by and large, which accounts for their being in a profession which encourages them to stay at their desks for years, if necessary, pondering what to say next and how best to say it.... The only way to get anything out of a writer's brain is to leave him or her alone until her or she is damn well ready to write it down.

Genius! Want some more? Here's a bit from the interview itself:

INTERVIEWER: Did your sister try to write for money, too?
VONNEGUT: No. She could have been a remarkable sculptor, too. I bawled her out one time for not doing more with the talents she had. She replied that having talent doesn't carry with it the obligation that something has to be done with it. This was startling news to me. I thought people were supposed to grab their talents and run as far and fast as they could.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think now?
VONNEGUT: Well ' what my sister said now seems a peculiarly feminine sort of wisdom. I have two daughters who are as talented as she was, and both of them are damned if they are going to lose their poise and senses of humor by snatching up their talents and desperately running as far and as fast as they can. They saw me run as far and as fast as I could - and it must have looked like quite a crazy performance to them. And this is the worst possible metaphor, for what they actually saw was a man sitting still for decades.

I hope you all find that as hilarious as I did. But anyway, it's just astoundingly beautiful, the whole interview. Vonnegut is such a genius dialogue-ist, and to watch him play around like this, asking himself questions and picking up on the subtext beneath the answers in order to ask slightly more probing questions, or even veering off into totally unexpected territory... Well really, it's just wonderful.