Playing on the title of his first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think, Larry Woiwode's fresh, endearing memoir chronicles the years leading up to its publication in 1969. He views his early life from the vantage point of the bitterly cold winter of 1996 in North Dakota, where he resides with his wife and children, seamlessly interweaving his memories with an often comic account of the mishap-fraught installation of a new wood-burning furnace. Woiwode's supple, burnished prose teems with love for his family and with religious faith all the more moving for being quietly and unpretentiously expressed. His early struggles as an actor, poet, and fiction writer gain depth from this mature perspective, which also ensures that mentions of the literary celebrities who cross his path (John Updike, Truman Capote, and Robert Lowell, among others) never seem like mere name-dropping. Woiwode's affectionate portrait of Robert De Niro, a friend since the actor was 19 and the author 21, gives a marvelously vivid sense of De Niro's idiosyncratic personality. Even more revelatory is the detailed account of Woiwode's relationship with legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, which shows a sensitive, challenging mentor helping a young writer find his voice. The writer frankly depicts hard times and bad moments, but his autobiography's fundamental emotion is joy. --Wendy Smith
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