"Tough-minded, witty, and refreshingly candid, this book represents a biographer's journey into autobiography. Joan Givner, best known for her controversial study Katherine Anne Porter: A Life, has written an unconventional but thoroughly compelling memoir in which the rational is played against the intuitive, the public against the private, the present against the past." "Givner rejects a conventional chronological narrative in favor of a series of numbered vignettes linked by a kind of free association. Reading the book is akin to turning a kaleidoscope: with each reconfiguring of elements, one's perception alters ever so slightly but ever so significantly. Givner reveals herself as child and adult, mother and daughter, biographer and subject, critic and fiction writer. There is stark power in the recollections of her working-class childhood in Manchester, England, and her return to England on the occasion of her father's death. There is poignancy and pain in the depictions of her relationship with her mother. And there is wry, self-deprecating humor in her evocations of life in the academy and the world of letters." "Among the most fascinating glimpses the book offers are those of Givner's experiences investigating the life of Katherine Anne Porter. Givner recalls Porter's invitation to become her biographer and literary executor and recounts visits to the writer's Maryland home and, later, to her hospital bedside. Depicted as well are Givner's meetings with Porter's friends and acquaintances - a research quest that led to one particularly fateful encounter with Eudora Welty." "Moving across geographical boundaries - England, the United States, Canada - as fluidly as it moves between past and present, The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer explores the overlapping strands of Givner's life without ever losing its narrative drive. A work of rare honesty and perception, it may well encourage readers to make their own journeys of self-examination."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved