The Crack-Up By F. Scott Fitzgerald

I had heard of this but not read it before. I'm glad I did, yet IMHO the piece does not deliver on its premise of self-confrontation. It's mostly a series of pirouettes.

It is hard to face such things (e.g. the realization that you no longer value the things you'd built a self around) and harder to write about them, especially if you're a talented writer and a celebrity and people are eagerly eating up whatever you say.

One place that seemed more compelling to me is the second half of part two, in which he dissects his attitudes to life and figures out whom he got them from. But nothing comes of it.

His style annoys me, and I have the same annoyed feeling when I read Gatsby. He gives the sense that...something is about to be said...but isn't. He's always almost saying something, and three essays later, I've learned nothing but that he's in apparent denial over his drinking problem. Compare Hemingway who wrote similar choppy sentences, but always conveyed information.

Better if read aloud.