My Other Life limns an artistic trajectory, which may or may not be that of Paul Theroux the chronicler of travel and of foreign places. It begins in the late 1960s in a leprosarium in Africa. The sheer ugliness of many of the people and places in the following pages has its source in Moyo. The lepers, in their fatalism and worldly indifference, are portrayed as parasites living off missionary charity, while the priests and nuns are themselves totally without vanity and without charm, indifferent to life beyond their narrow exercise of duty. Likewise the Theroux portrayed here, who is indifferent to real, lived life, slipping into various identities (e.g., donning the robes of the priest in Moyo), parasitically using all the people and situations he encounters as chapters for the novel we are reading. As in Moyo, nothing sacred or beautiful is spared in this pursuit.

Though the reader is commanded to read My Other Life as a novel, it touches stages of the actual life while transforming them into fiction. Marriage and family, the sole emotional anchoring of the first-person narrator, are grist for the writer's mill, serving importantly as the novel's frame. After Africa and Singapore (“Poetry Lessons”), we see Theroux settled in London, establishing his place in the literary firmament with novels like The Great Railway Bazaar and The Mosquito Coast. Chapter after chapter, however, reveals the fissures of a marriage, and in “Forerunners” we encounter his doppelgänger Andreas Vorlaufer, a travel writer who has already traversed the stages of Theroux's career, twenty years earlier. These include a divorce and a trip to the Pacific, on which Theroux is embarking at the novel's conclusion, after accepting the end of his marriage.

Some chapters (stories?) are funny; others are off-putting. The volume is best taken in toto, as the accumulation of a writer's life. Paul Theroux the person is unpleasant, but Paul Theroux the writer-in-becoming is very interesting. With the exception of the inhabitants of the leper colony, the people in these pages fail to separate fiction and life. “The Shortest Day of the Year” and “Traveler's Tale” concern the hilarious misperceptions that this failure produces. In the former story a murderous English lady is enraged at the Paul Theroux standing before her for getting her rug muddy, while waxing rapturous about the author of the books with whom she has fallen in love. In the latter he is confronted by an angry woman who has really lived the life of the places he has only visited and parasitically used. “The Writer and His Reader,” detailing an at-home dinner with an intoxicated Anthony Burgess, Theroux's own literary model, evokes anew the discrepancy between the writer and his work.

This disparity has already been enunciated in the book's prologue, concerning the author's uncle Hal, who claims to have done everything but who is really a liar. In person Hal is obnoxious, but when his novel appears it is praised for its sanity, elegance, and humanity.