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Last year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded the Best Picture Oscar Award to Parasite, the first non-English language film to win that award. Parasite is a Korean thriller/black comedy that teeters on the brink of gothic horror. Just an aside, it's also the last movie my husband and I watched in a movie theater since the COVID-19 global pandemic. I absolutely loved it. I thought the movie was smart, compelling, and suspenseful. The climax blew my mind! 

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Long-time readers of my previous LitReactor articles (or Twitter account) will recognize me as the guy who often complains about his terrible hotel job. For eight years I was employed as the night auditor for a hotel located somewhere in Central Texas. In my novel, The Nightly Disease, I referred to the hotel simply as The Goddamn Hotel. In reality, I will never reveal its true name, so don’t even ask.

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Whenever a renowned writer turns their quill on the behind scenes of a fellow penpusher, the results are often a mixed bag depending on the motivations of the author. Revenge or jealousy may be the ignoble impetus, or a devotion so deep that the prose dips into an undigestible worship. Here are four examples of writers who wrote it right—A.E. Hotchner, Eileen Simpson, Salman Rushdie, and Martin Amis—and their balanced memoirs that slip us satisfyingly behind the curtain without antipathy or idolatry.

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Letter image via John-Mark Smith

Dear Edgar Allan Poe,

It’s intimidating writing to you.

Would you believe me if I said I wrote this letter seven times only to throw it away, to rip it into pieces, to hide it under my floorboards and pretend it didn’t exist until I had to dig it out and start all over again?

I fell in love with you when I was twelve.