The trouble with autobiography

Autobiographies invariably distroy, insists author Paul Theroux, at his home in Hawaii. Susan Seubert. I was born, the third of seven children, in Medford, Massachusetts, so near to Boston that even as a small boy kicking along side streets to the Washington School, I could see the pencil stub of the Custom House Tower from the banks of the Mystic River.

The river meant everything to me: it flowed through our town, and in reed-fringed oxbows and muddy marshes that no longer exist, to Boston Harbor and the dark Atlantic. It was the reason for Medford rum and Medford shipbuilding; in the Triangular Trade the river linked Medford to Africa and the Caribbean—Medford circulating mystically in the world.

The Theroux ancestors had lived in rural Quebec from about , ten generations, the eleventh having migrated to Stoneham, up the road from Medford, where my father was born. Many French soldiers in the New World took Menominee women as their wives or lovers.

Novelist and travel writer Paul

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