You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles

This biography of writer Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky) is an impressionist version of the cult writer’s life — a wholly personal, often self-referential tale about a man and the woman obsessed with trying to understand him. In the 1970s, Dillon wrote a traditional biography of Jane Bowles, Paul’s wife, and in the course of her research spent weeks in Tangier, interviewing Bowles himself. More than a decade later, she was unable to get him out of her mind. Back she went to Tangier to engage in endless interviews with Bowles, many of which are excerpted in You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles. Dillon spends as much time on her own history with Bowles as on Bowles himself, which, while occasionally interesting, becomes overly exhibitionist after a while. B