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Title: Beg, Borrow, Steal

Subtitle: A Writer's Life

Author: Michael Greenberg

Narrator: Michael Coon

Format: Unabridged

Length: 4 hrs and 52 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-05-13

Publisher: Audible Studios for Bloomsbury

Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Personal Memoirs

Publisher's Summary:

In Beg, Borrow, Steal Michael Greenberg regales us with his wry and vivid take on the life of a writer of little means trying to practice his craft or simply stay alive. He finds himself doctoring doomed movie scripts; selling cosmetics from an ironing board in front of a women's department store; writing about golf, a game he has never played; and botching his debut as a waiter in a posh restaurant.

Central characters include Michael's father, whose prediction that Michael's "scribbling" wouldn't get him on the subway almost came true; his artistic first wife, whom he met in a Greenwich Village high school; and their son who grew up on the Lower East Side, fluent in the language of the street and in the language of the parlor. Then there are Greenberg's unexpected encounters: a Holocaust survivor who on his deathbed tries to leave Michael his fortune; a repentant communist who confesses his sins; a man who becomes a woman; a Chilean filmmaker in search of his past; and rats who behave like humans and cease to live underground.

Hilarious and bittersweet, Greenberg's stories invite us into a world where the familial, the literary, the tragic and the mundane not only speak to one another, but deeply enjoy the exchange.

Members Reviews:

I Really Wanted To Hate This Book

I really wanted to hate this book. I'm a struggling writer myself, and so it's in my nature to hate any writer who's more successful than I am - which would include almost anyone living or dead who has ever taken up a pen. But I also wanted to hate the book because I think the writer is guilty of a certain type of dishonesty that really annoys me: false self-representation as a struggling member of the proletariat. This is akin to Joseph Epstein's constant references to himself as an "autodidact" when in fact he was educated at the University of Chicago and has spent nearly his entire adult life employed in academia. This is akin to Anne Fadiman -- a graduate of Harvard University, an academic, former editor of The American Scholar, and frequent book reviewer -- constantly referring to herself as one of Virginia Woolf's "common readers," when Woolf states specifically that such readers are not critics or scholars nor even very well educated. One might also mention Diablo Cody who likes to pass herself off as some sort of edgy streetwise punk-turned-self-made-celebrity-screenwriter when in fact she's really just plain old upper-crust Brook Busey, raised in the affluent community of Lemont, Illinois, and educated at an exclusive private prep school before going on to earn a degree from the University of Iowa. Greenberg likes to pass himself off as some sort of hard-luck bohemian type from the pages of Jim Carroll's "Basketball Diaries." In his essays he emphasis the seediness of many of his apartments, the low-level jobs he's held, his intimate acquaintance with druggies, conmen, and other social misfits. But for the most part he has been just a tourist in the American underclass, descending into it just long enough to gather enough material for an essay or a story and then returning to the comfort of the upper-middle-class milieu in which he has spent most of his life. He emphasizes the fact that his father was a violent scrap metal dealer, as if to suggest that he grew up in some sort of hard-knocks working-class environment.