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Books Myra Breckinridge

Myra began with a first sentence. I was so intrigued by that sentence that I had to go on. Who was she? What did she have to say? A lot, as it turned out. The unconscious mind certainly shaped that book.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Gore Vidal The Paris Review 1974
It has the true charm of insolence, what Nietzsche must have meant when he wrote that after reading the New Testament he had to reread the “prankish mocker Petronius” to become clean again.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Robert Mazzocco New York Review of Books 1974
After many readings, Myra Breckinridge continues to give wicked pleasure, and still seems to have fixed the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neopornography ever can go.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Review of Books Harold Bloom New York Review of Books 1984

For Myra Breckinridge is a genuinely, brutally witty book, a parody on Hollywood, pop intellectualism, pornography and just about anything else you could name.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Eliot Fremont-Smith New York Times 1998
I think part of the bewilderment American book-chat writers have with me is that they realize that there’s something strange going on that ought not to be going on—that Myra Breckinridge might just possibly be a work of the imagination.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at The Paris Review Gore Vidal The Paris Review 1974

“I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess”. Wonderful stuff. A beguiling and terrifying heroine; unnerving and absurdly original.

— Lily Power