Q: What is your idea of perfect Happiness?
A: Imaging that something somewhere wants us to like it here.
Q: What living person do you most admire?
A: Nancy Reagan.
Q: What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A: Social Darwinism.
Q: What vehicle do you own?
A: 1988 Honda Accord.
Q: What is your favorite smell?
A: What comes out the back door of a bakery.
Q: What is your favorite word?
A: ''Amen.''
Q: What is your favorite building?
A: The Chrysler Building in Manhattan.
Q: What words or phrases do you most overuse?
A: "Excuse me."
Q: When and where were you happiest?
A: About ten years ago my Finnish publisher took me to a little inn on the edge of the permafrost in his country. We took a walk and found frozen ripe blueberries on bushes. We thawed them in our mouths. It was as though something somewhere wanted us to like it here.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: In an airplane crash on the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro.
Q: What talent would you most like to have?
A: Cello.
Q: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
A: Teeth.

Chapter XVI. In order not to seem a spiritual quadriplegic to strangers trying to get a fix on me, I sometimes say I am a Unitarian Universalist (I breathe).

	Buy Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage. The Amazon site has 10 sample pages from the book.
	London's Sunday Times review
	Washington Post review

Chapter XIX. I can be more prompt than the Roman Catholic Church in announcing who is a saint, since I do not require courtroom-style proofs that so-and-so was on at least three occassions capable of magic with the help of God. It is enough for me if a person (like a good anthropologist) easily finds all races and classes equally respectable and intersting, and doesn't keep score with money.

An Autobiographical Collage
1991

Contemporary Authors,49. ''While Vonnegut's fiction is couchedly candid in its reflection of his personal views on many subjects, his essays and other works of nonfiction are even more so. He has published several collections of essays, interviews, and speeches, including Palm Sunday.- An Autobiographical Collage in 1981 and Fates Worse than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s, a similar mix to Palm Sunday, published a decade later. In Fates Worse than Death, collected essays and speeches are interwoven with memoir and parenthetical commentary written especially for the volume. Subject matter ranges from the broadly political Westem imperialism and America's war-greed to the painfully personal Vonnegut's own prisoner-of-war experiences and bouts with mental illness. Douglas Anderson describes the collection in the New York Times Book Review as 'scarily funny' and feels that 'it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart.' In the Times Literary Supplement, James Woods concludes that the 'more Vonnegut writes the more American he seems--a kind of de-solemnized Emerson, at once arguer, doubter, sermonizer and gossip.'''

Chapter II. I didn't get to choose my ancestors, and I look upon my brain and the rest of my body as a house I inhabit which was built long before I was born.

© The New York Times
September 15, 1991 
By DOUG ANDERSON

FATES WORSE THAN DEATH: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s.  
By Kurt Vonnegut. Putnam.  

In Fates Worth Than Death, Kurt Vonnegut applies an apocalyptic eye to everything from global starvation to censorship. In this collection of speeches, essays and memoirs, linked together by reflective passages, Mr. Vonnegut is perhaps more intimate with the reader than ever. He reveals a tortured family life and tells stories of alcoholism and insanity and of deep grief and, sometimes, reconciliation. The method of the book is, not surprisingly, comic. But there is always a hook at the root of each laugh that pulls up more than expelled breath. "I will say anything to be funny, often in the most horrible situations, which is one reason two good women so far have been very sorry on occasion to have married me," he writes. There is a searing quality to Mr. Vonnegut's humor that eviscerates sham and hypocrisy, but also laughs at its own complicity in the vices he ridicules. Fates Worse Than Death is honest and scarily funny, and it offers a rare insight into an author who has customarily hidden his heart.

Chapter II. You cannot be a good writer of serious fiction if you are not depressed. 

Chapter VIII. (I worry about what they teach at Yale.)

BOOK: Fates Worse than Death REVIEWS: London's Sunday Times  ·  Washington Post RELATED: Wampeters, Foma & Granfaloons  ·  Complete Writings

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