Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace

and them and to erase it, a little, that difference … to give us the (we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.
    However seductively they promise, though, these autobiographies rarely deliver. And Beyond Center Court: My Story is especially bad. The book fails not so much because it’s poorly written (which it is—I don’t know what ghostwriter Brennan’s enhancing function was supposed to be here, but it’s hard to see how Austin herself could have done any worse than two hundred dead pages of “Tennis took me like a magic carpet to all kinds of places and all kinds of people” enlivened only by wincers like “Injuries—the signature of the rest of my career—were about to take hold of me”), but because it commits what any college sophomore knows is the capital crime of expository prose: it forgets who it’s supposed to be for.
    Obviously, a good commercial memoir’s first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who’s spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet. But none of Beyond Center Court’ s loyalties are to the reader. The author’s primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends. Whole pages are given over to numbing Academy Award-style tributes to parents, siblings, coaches, trainers, and agents, plus little burbles of praise for pretty much every athlete and celebrity she’s ever met. In particular, Austin’s account of her own (extremely, transcendently interesting) competitive career keeps digressing into warm fuzzies on each opponent she faces. Typical example: Her third round at 1980’s Wimbledon was against American Barbara Potter, who, we learn,
is a really good person. Barbara was very nice to me through my injuries, sending me books, keeping in touch, and checking to see how I was doing. Barbara definitely was one of the smartest people on the tour; I’ve heard she’s going to college now, which takes a lot of initiative for a woman our age. Knowing Barbara, I’m sure she’s working harder than all her fellow students.
    But there is also here an odd loyalty to and penchant for the very clichés with which we sports fans weave the veil of myth and mystery that these sports memoirs promise to part for us. It’s almost as if Tracy Austin has structured her own sense of her life and career to accord with the formulas of the generic sports bio. We’ve got the sensitive and doting mother, the kindly dad, the mischievous siblings who treat famous Tracy like just another kid. We’ve got the ingenue heroine whose innocence is eroded by experience and transcended through sheer grit; we’ve got the gruff but tenderhearted coach and the coolly skeptical veterans who finally accept the heroine. We’ve got the wicked, backstabbing rival (in Pam Shriver, who receives the book’s only unfulsome mention). We even get the myth-requisite humble roots. Austin, whose father is a corporate scientist and whose mother is one of those lean tan ladies who seem to spend all day every day at the country club tennis courts, tries to portray her childhood in posh Rolling Hills Estates CA as impoverished: “We had to be frugal in all kinds of ways … we cut expenses by drinking powdered milk … we didn’t have bacon except on Christmas.” Stuff like this seems way out of touch with reality until we realize that the kind of reality the author’s chosen to be in touch with here is not just un- but anti-real.
    In fact, as unrevealing of character as its press-release tone and generic-myth structure make this memoir, it’s the narrator’s cluelessness that permits us our only glimpses of anything like a real and faceted life. That is, relief from the book’s skewed loyalties can be found only in those places where the author seems unwittingly to betray them. She protests, for instance, repeatedly and with an almost Gertrudian fervor, that her mother “did not force” her into tennis at age three, it