T here's a funny, telling scene early in Mark Matousek's new memoir, in which the hopeful young writer, newly hired at Interview magazine in the early 1980s, is taken to meet its then-editor, Robert Hayes. Nobody writes here.
Nobody even reads. . .
We illustrate pictures. Matousek's head is given another spin when he is ushered into the presence of Interview's founder and presiding paleface, Andy Warhol. Matousek abandons New York, first with a novelist friend and later alone, in search of deeper spiritual truths. The book becomes a kind of New Age travelogue as Matousek careens from Zen monasteries to Buddhist retreats to yoga weekends to kundalini initiations. His search becomes more frantic when he discovers that he himself is HIV positive.