Superb: on the one hand, gregarious and gossipy, on the other, a peek inside the workshop of a master.

Neil Simon's memoir, REWRITES (1996), serves to support the theory that some of the best comedy is born of unhappiness and pain. Not that Simon really dwells on his childhood, but it does come out here and there how his father often deserted the family for months or more at a time, contributing little to their support, and this was during the hardest of times, the Great Depression.

This is a book filled with varied and strange backstage stories and show biz anecdotes, peppered liberally with famous names. Mike Nichols figured prominently in Simon's success, garnering at least four Tony Awards as best director in the early years of Simon's career as a playwright. Maureen Stapleton was his favorite actress.

The book's title is most apt, as Simon illustrates repeatedly how Broadway plays often survive solely because they can be constantly tweaked, rearranged, rewritten, and he was a shining example of a man able to think fast and "fix" a play that was floundering, often rewriting whole scenes in a corner during rehearsals.

Even given his early success, Simon was a man prone to panic attacks and claustrophobia, the latter problem probably caused by a "mother who tied me with a rope to my high chair," an understanding reached through psychoanalysis.

Simon tells of his 'mid-life' crisis, when he ALMOST made a terrible mistake (leaving his wife), but did not. And how he finally realized, after he turned forty, that "old people you know weren't always old ... They were once the way you are now, and inevitably you will eventually be like them, with others thinking you were always old." Some people never do figure this out, until it's too late.

But REWRITES is, perhaps more than anything, a love story and a tribute to Simon's first wife, Joan, his strongest and most constant supporter, who died from cancer at age forty. Her final illness is described with such wrenching honesty that it left me nearly in tears.

My only complaint, which really isn't one, is that it ends with Joan's death in 1973, when Simon was only forty-six, left with two young daughters, fifteen and ten. I couldn't help but wonder what happened then. (I checked Wikipedia and learned that Simon has been married three times since then.) But bottom line? This is a damn good book, a life story told well, honestly and unflinchingly. ( )