In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xvii 1 Introduction 1 Charles Van Doren, “Herb Stempel Was the First to Agree to the Fix” 2 Jim Bouton, “If We Explain We’re Shooting Beaver, They’ll Understand” 8 The Transgressive I, the Exculpatory Account 12 2 Autobiography and Memoir 14 Memoir and Autobiography 18 The Memoir Explosion 23 Literal Facticity: Does It Matter? 28 James Frey, “I Honestly Have No Idea” 36 3 Autonarrating Transgression 43 The “I” and the “Me” 44 Vocabularies of Motive 45 Is to Explain to Condone? 47 The Presentation of Self 48 Accounts 51 Techniques of Neutralization: Theory or Concept? 53 To Whom Are Self-Exculpations Addressed? 58 In Sum: Neutralizing Deviance 60 vi / Contents 4 Criminal Behavior 64 Joe Bonanno, “This Is How I Earned My Living” 66 Edward Bunker, “What Else Could I Do?” 70 Jack Henry Abbott, “If You Behave like a Man, You Are Doomed” 75 Jordan Belfort, “$12.5 Million! In Three Minutes!” 80 Accounting for Crime 88 5 Substance Abuse 94 Pete Hamill, “This Is What Men Do” 98 Susan Cheever, “Drinking Was Part of Our Heritage” 102 Steve Geng, “I Was Romanticizing Lives of Crime” 104 William Cope Moyers, “I Was Doomed to Fail No Matter How Hard I Tried” 108 Accounting for Substance Abuse 112 6 Sexual Transgressions 113 Roman Polanski, “Everyone Wants to Fuck Young Girls” 118 Kerry Cohen, “My Parade of Boys Continues” 128 Melissa Febos, “I Took Aim and Flicked the Whip toward Him” 133 Kirk Read, “I Wanted to Be Shirley Temple” 138 Accounting for Sexual Transgressions 143 7 Political Deviance 145 Elia Kazan, “I Was Notorious, an Informant, a Squealer, a Rat” 148 Norman Podhoretz, “The Theory Circulated That I Had Gone Mad” 152 Malcolm X, “I Never Have Felt That I Would Live to Become an Old Man” 155 Cathy Wilkerson, “The Intention Was Not to Cause Carnage but Chaos” 162 Accounting for Political Transgressions 166 8 Accounting for Deviance 168 How They Account for Themselves 170 Searching for Common Threads 181 Looking Back 183 References 185 Index 193 ...

Share