Gore Vidal recounts the first thirty-nine years of his life with the characteristic wit and combativeness that made him one of America's most provocative public intellectuals. Born into political aristocracy—his maternal grandfather was Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, and his stepfather's family included Jacqueline Kennedy's—Vidal moved through the corridors of American power from childhood, and his memoir reads as both personal history and insider's tour of mid-century American politics and culture. He describes his wartime service in the Aleutian Islands, his emergence as a literary prodigy with his first novel published at nineteen, and the scandal that followed his third novel, The City and the Pillar, whose frank treatment of homosexuality led the New York Times to blacklist his work for years. The memoir is populated with vivid portraits of the famous: Tennessee Williams as a nervous, giggling companion on the streets of Rome; Jack Kerouac as an uncomfortable guest in a world he did not quite understand; Eleanor Roosevelt as a shrewd political operator behind her public warmth; the Kennedys as a family whose charm could not quite conceal their ruthlessness. Vidal writes from his villa in Ravello, Italy, and the distance lends his recollections a quality of sardonic detachment. He is candid about his romantic and sexual life, including his long companionship with Howard Austen, while maintaining a deliberate reticence about emotional interiority. The title refers to a manuscript page that has been scraped clean and written over, a metaphor Vidal applies to memory itself—what remains visible, he suggests, is as much invention as recollection.