As Ms. Tallchief recalled in her memoir, "An anonymous man in an unfamiliar town decided our fate with those few words".
As the anonymous author wrote in his memoir, "Man cannot see too much of human nature".
The balance between fact and fiction in George Orwell's investigations of poverty has been questioned ever since an anonymous reviewer of his 1933 memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London, wondered "if the author was really down and out".
But the timing is apt — not only because of the swarming headlines but because it follows the release of "The Incest Diary," a memoir published last summer by an anonymous American author.
She is not wanton like Catherine Millet, the French art critic and editor whose 2001 memoir graphically catalogs her never-ending anonymous sexual encounters — in swingers clubs, offices, parking lots, cemeteries and trucks in the Bois de Boulogne.
Should the anonymous prankster, or even Jacob himself, step forward to write a memoir, it would probably be considerably more entertaining than this collection of measured banalities and grandly privileged utterances.
"No! 3 days later" reads one anonymous critic's penciled margin note, correcting the travel chronology in an 1880s memoir by Richard Collinson, who had made fruitless searches for the lost explorer John Franklin.
In a week when assorted police forces seem to be backing off from anonymous allegations of VIP paedophile murder, and after Paul Gambaccini has just published an angry memoir about his treatment at the hands of Operation Yewtree, it is worth asking.
While Charles Foster, a barrister, Oxford academic and former vet, doesn't quite manage the magic-realist metamorphosis of Cortazar's anonymous narrator, he achieves some startling transformations over the course of his wildly eccentric memoir, Being a Beast.
But in 2011 Clark blew his anonymous cover by publishing Dream Repairman: Adventures in Film Editing, a lively and revelatory memoir of his days in the cutting room working on movies by, notably, John Schlesinger, Stanley Donen, Mike Leigh and Roland Joffé.
