Autobiography, George Orwell argued, is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. About the author he meant and, mindful of this, American journalist John Taylor is careful in his portrait of his marriage and its breakdown to scrupulously record his own shortcomings.
He notes his self-denials, self-deceptions and self-servings, the periods of "dangerously disproportionate self-regard" about his career, the sudden rage which on one occasion causes him to assault an unhelpful cabdriver and on another to abuse a honking motorist, his ability to lie about a series of furtively-conducted liaisons, and the accusations his wife makes about his drinking.
But, for this reader, it doesn't wash, mainly because, for all the earnestly expressed soul-searching, the man likes himself too much to be able to see his personality as the reader comes to see it. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the book is how he reveals himself without knowing that he's doing it.
The self-regard, for instance, concerns a career which, we're given to understand, is pretty darned impressive anyway - he's been a staff writer with Esquire, New York Magazine and Newsweek - and a lot more interesting than his wife's unfocused and desultory forays into the same line of work. The rage, he insists, was never directed at her or their young daughter and thus is not a factor. As for the drinking, well, that's what she thought was a potentially dangerous problem, and so he had better write it down, but it's not true and definitely has no bearing on what came to pass.
More significantly, his wife, the Englishwoman who captivated him at first sight and whom he married and raised a child with for 12 years, remains a rather blurry figure right to the end, certainly less vividly drawn than the three women with whom he had affairs while the marriage was going through its bad times.
To be fair to him, he writes well about how he and his wife lost not just the ability to communicate but also, and more damagingly, the desire to do so, and he's eloquently perceptive, too, on why couples stay together when outsiders think they should long have parted, but the general tenor of the book is more self-serving than he imagines when he uses the term, and you begin to long for another point of view - crucially that of his wife.
She, you suspect, would have a very different slant on the marriage and what went wrong with it and mightn't have much truck with his agonisings about the affairs he embarks on or his yearnings for an elusive "moral authenticity" to give meaning to his actions and his life.
She might also reflect that the man she spent so many years with can dismiss a woman colleague as "unmarried and embittered", can sweepingly assert that "the narrow roles imposed on women" after the second World War "turned many of them into neurotics" and can scoff at her own expressed request that, as a sufferer from Parkinson's disease, she have a maid to help out at home.
But, of course, you don't know what she thinks because it's not her book, it's his. And, yes, that would be all right except that long before the end you're asking the question invited by so many of these voguishly popular memoirs, whether they be about miserable childhoods, traumatised teen years or unsatisfactory adulthoods: why are you telling me this?
Or, to put it another way: why, instead of using the time-honoured and kindly disguise of fiction, have you chosen to risk public hurt to your wife and daughter by laying bare your version of their private selves to the world? Are there enough redeemingly honest insights here to warrant such a decision? The answer, in this case anyway, is a very definite: no, there aren't.