“I’m there, even in the passages when I’m not there.” I sneak in throughout the 13 interchapters,” in which Parini shares memories of their travels and a relationship he describes at times as a variation of a father-and-son dynamic. I think I came up with a novel approach: the memoir-biography. “It was a challenge to think how to do this book. “For me, the previous biographies were like homework assignments, going through letters and diaries, talking to living family and friends,” Parini says from his home in Vermont. “His reputation preceded him,” Parini says of the frequently combative and cantankerous Vidal, but a friendship blossomed, and, Parini writes, “A series of conversations began that lasted until his death in 2012.” In the book, Parini describes a feeling of terror when Vidal responds to an introductory note with an invitation to dinner. Parini, whose work includes biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck (as well as the novel “The Last Station,” about Leo Tolstoy), met Vidal in the mid-1980s on the southern coast of Italy, where Vidal lived with his longtime partner, Howard Austen. Now poet, novelist and acclaimed literary biographer Jay Parini enters the conversation with “Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal” (Doubleday), which blends these many streams with the story of Parini’s three-decade friendship with his subject.
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