My Life As a Man is American writer Philip Roth's seventh novel. The work is split into two sections: the first section, "Useful Fictions," consisting of two short stories about a character named Nathan Zuckerman , and the second section, "My True Story," which takes the form of a first-person memoir by Peter Tarnopol, a Jewish writer who authored the two stories in the first section. My Life As a Man is the first of Roth's work that tackles the issue of the writer's relationship to his work, a theme he would develop in subsequent novels, particularly Operation Shylock. In his autobiography,... Roth reveals that much of Tarnopol's life is based on his own experiences; for example, Roth's destructive marriage to Margaret Martinson, which is portrayed through Tarnopol's relationship with the character of Maureen. In The New York Times Book Review, critic Morris Dickstein compared the novel to its predecessor Portnoy's Complaint: No writer, not even Mailer or Lowell, has contributed more to the confessional climate than Philip Roth.
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