![]() ![]() ![]() These slights were an indication of far darker things to come. In the same essay, he scorned “the hatred and fear of women that runs through the Old Testament (not to mention in the pages of our justly admired Jewish novelists).” “Many Christers and some Jews don’t like poor white people very much, on the old Puritan ground that if you’re good, God will make you rich,” Vidal wrote in “Sex Is Politics,” published in Playboy in January 1979. ![]() Vidal would often exceed the bounds of polite discourse, and his selection of words and targets could be quite revealing. The closeness between writer and subject is to the book’s benefit - it is also its crux. Parini interlaces his fairly standard chronological structure with vignettes from Vidal’s life to which he was a witness. ![]() He agreed, on the condition that he was allowed to publish “Empire of Self” only upon Vidal’s passing in 2012. Parini, who was Vidal’s friend of 30 years, was anointed by Vidal to write about him after Fred Kaplan’s 1999 biography displeased its subject. ![]()
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