Thursday, August 13, 2015

[book review] Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals

Dinty W. Moore's Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals is not really an advice book. Nor is it really about love or cannibals, although there is advice in there to be gleaned, and he does mention both love and cannibals. He also talks a lot about Michel de Montaigne, an essayist Dinty seems to admire. It's really a string of confessions about writing and living as a writer, and it's really very funny. It's also quite short, and the high ratio of illustrations mean you're turning pages rather more rapidly than usual.

The book has an index, which I only mention because it helped me just now, when I couldn't remember how to spell Michel de Montaigne, but I'm not sure why it's there, except as a joke. Maybe it's a joke. 

More on this later.