Who is the ‘You’ that Paul Auster’s memories in Report from the Interior are addressed? Not even addressed, perhaps it is more accurate to say directed, by a giant wagging finger, a bit like Monty Python’s all-crushing foot. Auster’s new autobiography begins with his recollections of the list of injunctions that governed his formative years – ‘Always forgive others – but never yourself … Don’t brag … Turn out the lights before you leave a room’ – equating mundane crimes with the grave, like children do. As his remembered childhood world migrates towards his younger self’s increased understanding and experience, it never becomes less moral.

Auster proposes at the beginning of his memoir that the task of ‘exploring your mind as you remember it from childhood’ has been undertaken ‘not because you find yourself a rare or exceptional object of study, but precisely because you don’t, because you think of yourself as anyone, everyone’. Whether or not you think Auster is anyone, everyone or even someone remains up to you, but from the earliest moments of this book, he parts ways with conventional autobiography by removing himself as the boundary that limits his memory’s spread, alluringly including the reader in each occurrence and flinty recollection.

Being pummelled with Auster’s ‘You’, to whom the whole book is written, is to feel personally accused of being the one who performed his private memories, however it breaks down an attempt to just observe this autobiography. By offering the intense experience of his moments of recollection themselves rather than a conventional surface portrayal of a nostalgic world, Auster makes the story about the story we tell ourselves. The effect this has is a peculiarly authentic version of interior life, specific to Auster, but also able to be read as an archaeology of our collective sandpit.

Matthew Benjamin