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Excerpted by permission of Random House Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
Jump to full article: New York Times, 2008-04-15
Intro: The most memorable entries in this collection deal not with such modern-day, talk show confessionals, but with more old-fashioned reminiscing about people and places the author once knew. In the title essay he recalls a boating jaunt in the summer of 1963 with John F. Kennedy, who handed him a Havana-made Partagas cigar.
“I was aware,” Styron writes, “that this was a contraband item under the embargo against Cuban goods and that the embargo had been promulgated by the very man who had just pressed the cigar into my hand.”
Several months later Styron ran into Kennedy at a fancy New York party. “Rose and I, entering the dinner, discovered him at the bottom of a flight of stairs looking momentarily lost and abandoned. As if arrested in an instant’s solitude, he was talking to no one and pondering his cigar. He had a splendid Palm Beach tan. He threw his arms around us and uttered a line so cornily ingratiating that it gave blarney new meaning: ‘How did they get you to come here? They had a hard enough time getting me!’
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