I sneak in throughout the 13 interchapters,” in which Parini shares memories of their travels and a relationship he describes at times as a variation of a father-and-son dynamic. I think I came up with a novel approach: the memoir-biography.

“It was a challenge to think how to do this book. “For me, the previous biographies were like homework assignments, going through letters and diaries, talking to living family and friends,” Parini says from his home in Vermont. “His reputation preceded him,” Parini says of the frequently combative and cantankerous Vidal, but a friendship blossomed, and, Parini writes, “A series of conversations began that lasted until his death in 2012.” In the book, Parini describes a feeling of terror when Vidal responds to an introductory note with an invitation to dinner. Parini, whose work includes biographies of William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck (as well as the novel “The Last Station,” about Leo Tolstoy), met Vidal in the mid-1980s on the southern coast of Italy, where Vidal lived with his longtime partner, Howard Austen. This is the biography Gore Vidal has long needed.Now poet, novelist and acclaimed literary biographer Jay Parini enters the conversation with “Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal” (Doubleday), which blends these many streams with the story of Parini’s three-decade friendship with his subject. Provided with unique access to Vidal's life and his papers, he excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. Jay Parini crafts Vidal's life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death.

The life of Gore Vidal was an amazingly full one-full of colorful incident, famous people, and lasting achievements-that calls out for careful evocation and examination. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well-a virtual Who's Who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood. The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life.

An intimate, authorized, yet frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century.

Empire of Self by Jay Parini