The New York Times Book Review - James Parker
…here we have something rather cosmic: Into the hands of witty Alexander Masters, ardent celebrant of the hidden and the rejected, falls this diary dump, this exiled word-hoard, this abandoned trove of interiority. Homeless writing, in the realest sense. Can he face it? Can he take it on? He can…Spiritual American Trash is the title of a wonderful book by Greg Bottoms about American outsider artists…The diaries in A Life Discarded are spiritual English trash—they live in an English landscape of dreaming woods and quelled hopes; they use an English vocabulary…And as Masters—probably the only writer in the world who could have or would have done it this way—approaches their author, he simultaneously approaches something ineffable and thronelike: the span of a soul across an arc of time; the radiant, baffling grandeur of other people.
Publishers Weekly
★ 12/05/2016
With surprise, humor, and quiet insights that never seem glib, biographer Masters (Stuart: A Life Backwards) pursues an extraordinary question: what is the value of an ordinary life? With wonderful excerpts, original handwriting, photographs, sketches, and extravagant speculation, Masters brings to vivid life the 148 anonymous diaries that come into his possession, and constructs a richly compelling narrative around his experience of discovering their owner. The narrative of the diary author’s obsessions, ambitions, great loves, and disappointments is scaffolded with mysteries and discoveries that keep Masters revising his initial assumptions. He employs graphologists, private detectives, concert pianists, and judicious trespassing to understand his subject, but enjoys the anonymity, “sense of quiet universality,” and truth captured in this scrupulously documented existence. Despite some shortcomings, Masters’s subject has produced something impressive and unprecedented: “a forty-million-word description of being alive.” As much a guided tour of Masters’s own mind as that of his subject, this book is funny, original, astonishing, and poignant in its revelations that, in biography as in life, there are no tidy answers—but there is an incredible value in the ordinary, in “the resonance of tiny things” and “triumphs of a scribbled-down life.” Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge, and White (U.K.) (Oct.)
From the Publisher
"An affecting, bittersweet portrait of an anonymous person rescued—if rescued it is—from obscurity quite by accident … A lovely, elegant book of interest to historians and biographers as much as to general readers." - Kirkus Reviews
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Masters is a beautiful writer: funny, inquisitive and attentive; the talents on display in his barnstorming 2005 book Stuart: A Life Backwards can be seen here, too." —The Guardian
Kirkus Review
★ Sept. 6, 2016
An affecting, bittersweet portrait of an anonymous person rescued—if rescued it is—from obscurity quite by accident.The yarn begins when British social worker Masters (Simon: The Genius in My Basement, 2012, etc.) discovered a load of books thrown out in a skip—what we’d call a dumpster—in one of those eureka moments for bibliophiles: “Clustered inside a broken shower basin, wedged into the gaps around a wrenched-off door, flapping in the breeze on top of the broken bricks and slates, were armfuls of books.” But not books, really. Instead, they were the diaries of someone who, with hurried hand and buffeted heart, filled 148 volumes from margin to margin with the marginalia of life, thousands of words. Tracing them back to a half-century earlier, Masters set to wondering about the identity of the author. It would be ungallant to reveal what he discovered in his quest for that identity except to say that the writer, whom he ultimately sniffed out, wasn’t opposed to being uncovered, and for subtle and complicated reasons. Part of Masters’ account is an entertaining tale of scholarly detection during which he relied on the talents of a graphologist of a sort who might have been put to work at Bletchley Park a couple of generations earlier. In a Sherlock-ian flash, she lists many of the writer’s details, to which an amazed Masters asked, “you can tell from the handwriting?” The reply: “I can tell that from reading what she’s written. Haven’t you tried doing that yet?” But part of his account is also a gentle meditation on lives of profoundly quiet desperation—the lives of most people, in other words, who will never be enshrined in diaries, even discarded ones, to say nothing of books about them. The sad developments in Masters’ own life as he researched and wrote make a poignant counterpoint. A lovely, elegant book of interest to historians and biographers as much as to general readers.
