I'll forgive Dorfman the cliched expressions and the bits of purple prose because he's led an admirable life yet he's not afraid to show himself at his most embarrassing (e.g. the story involving Sting). Fascinating reading. ( )

I'm pretty sure that Dorfman intentionally makes it difficult to like his present self, like, he wants you to feel the distaste you feel as you read his life story as told by himself. Why? Maybe because he wants you to come to terms with the person he's presenting himself to be, and through the process of reading his book, he figures you'll grow as a person as well. I don't know, I want to say the subtitle should be "How I came to love my full-on bourgeois self" (in the parlance of the time when he co-wrote the Donald Duck book, which, by the way, is a remarkable and compelling cultural artifact).

I wrote a bunch of nasty margin notes because it's so hard not to feel offended, but I felt like Dorfman was in control of my own actions as I did so, like, those notes are exactly what he wanted me to write. I'm still trying to figure out why, though. What is his didactic mission here? ( )