The Baltimore Sun‘s books page recently featured a symposium
whose participants were asked what book they wished had never been written. Some of the answers were deadly serious (I picked Das Kapital, while several others opted for Mein Kampf), some funny (one person sent A Year in Provence to oblivion), but Joan Mellen covered herself in honor with this response:
A book that never should have been written is my own Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). At 552 pages in minuscule publisher’s revenge type, it is a loose and baggy monster of a biography. Kay Boyle’s modest if decisive contribution to the modernist short story and to expatriate Twenties Paris could easily have been covered with force and simplicity in a neat biographical study of two hundred pages in length.
Give that woman a grant!