BEG, BORROW, STEAL: A Writer’s Life, by Michael Greenberg. Other Press; 216 pages; $19.95
Writers don’t make much money. I offer this not as a blazing insight into fiduciary reality, just as a bland statement of fact. Michael Greenberg knows it, too, and a lot of his fine collection of essays revolve around that usually unspoken fact.
Greenberg, best known as the author of Hurry Down Sunshine, his memoir about his daughter’s sudden onset of madness, also writes a column for the Times Literary Supplement, said column providing the contents for Beg, Borrow and Steal.

As befits a weekly columnist, the pieces are all over the map, from a piece about the persistent disease of checking your sales ranking on Amazon — “the writer’s stock exchange” — to “polyamory” i.e. swappers, in Greenwich Village.
Very few of the pieces are tied to current events, which is always the death of column collections. Greenberg has a way of having fun with people while maintaining what seems to be a steely objectivity, mostly because of the unyielding precision of his prose. The Relationship Coach for the polyamorists is describes as “tall, voluptuous, with long coppery hair … she looks as if she has stepped out of the pages of a Robert Crumb cartoon.”
A lot of the pieces circle around Greenberg’s own peripatetic and often brutally unrewarding literary life, from his abrasive relationship with his father, who expected Greenberg to work in the family’s scrap metal business, to the editor Theodore Solotaroff, who once returned a novel to Greenberg with a note reading: “This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction. Good luck in trying to find it a home.”
There are also little autobiographical vignettes — helping Borges across the street in Buenos Aires, and having the writer say that the political situation in Argentina was like “watching a slow sunset” — the same phrase he used to describe his blindness. Greenberg tries it all: writing movies that never get made, and learning from the results of his first novel that sometimes writing needs to be approached as a conventional part-time occupation, like selling cosmetics, or driving a cab.
The equivalent of these are ghostwriting and other various for-hire gigs — “a subcontractor who works on various parts of a house without ever building one from start to finish himself.”
But Greenberg transcends the workaday in beautiful pieces about riding in the cab of a subway car on Christmas Day, a gift from a motorman friend of his. “The view from the cab is thrilling: diamond switches on the tracks being swallowed beneath us, steel dust pouring from the rails, a cross made of gnarled bones in a passing apartment window.”
There’s another beauty in a longish essay on Hart Island, where New York buries its indigent dead, 800,000 and counting dumped into unmarked mass graves.
Beg, Borrow, Steal ends up resembling Ben Hecht’s early collected journalism, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and 1001 Afternoons in New York, written in the 1920s and still in print from the University of Chicago.
Hecht was far more sentimental than Greenberg, but the two writers share a common interest in the trials and tribulations of people who don’t get written about in newspapers — not movers and shakers, not rock stars or ballers, just people swimming as fast as they can with the water at their chin.
They’re also similar in that their pieces unintentionally reveal at least as much about them as they do about their subjects, which is what good writers do, no matter what project they turn their hand to.