Oy vay

The situation with Philip Roth’s biography is one of the most ironic I’ve ever seen.

He was some kind of distant cousin of mine. We never could figure out the exact relationship (something on my grandmother’s side). My mother did grow up with Sandy Roth, Philip’s younger brother; but Philip was quite a bit younger and they never hung out with him. And after Philip left for college he never had much to do with the extended family again.

I don’t particularly like his writing, I find it unnecessarily dark, sometimes morbid. I could never get all the way through his books. But I do know this: He worked very hard, so hard, on his legacy via the authorized biography. So it finally comes out in 2021 and is about to soar right to the top of the best-seller lists. Philip Roth would have liked that. Then disaster struck and the book was pulled out of circulation due to allegations of sexual impropriety (of all things) against the author, Blake Bailey. Philip Roth would not have liked that.