“Barack,” I corrected, dropping my bags on the floor. . . . Tell me, Barack. What brings you to our fair city?”

I tried to explain. I had spent the summer brooding over a misspent youth, I said-the state of the world and the state of my soul. “I want to make amends,” I said. “Make myself of some use.”

Hmmmm. The writing of the memoir is formulaic. (Sorry, Benj). That can be the result of bad writing. Or it can be the result of bad material that the writer just can’t make good, no matter what the shade of lipstick.

“Misspent youth”? Cringe. This from a, what, 20 year old? Misspending your youth is what most 20 year olds are really after.

Poverty? No help from grandparents?

What’s with the fast on Sundays? Health reasons? Religious? Doesn’t seem likely to be the latter since Sundays are not a traditional day of fasting in Islam or Christianity. I don’t think Oxy was big on fasting, nor Columbia.

I’m not likely to read the entire memoir, let alone do a full literary analysis. But at any page, when I open it, the narrative seems contrived, not corresponding to my sense of the time, nor to the sense of others who lived at that time and in those places.