Passionate spectator

the long version

"In Passionate Spectator, memoirist Peter Leroy and his wife, Albertine, are living in Manhattan - by the skin of their teeth. Casting about for a source of income, Peter purchases a book from a homeless street corner peddler, Creative Self-Promotion for Taxidermists, hoping he can adapt its techniques to promote his fledgling business, Memoirs While You Wait, a writing service designed to satisfy the contemporary compulsion for confession and self-revelation." "That book opens into a journey from fiction to truth and back again, involving Peter, his childhood friend Matthew Barber (a pseudonymous restaurant reviewer who is undergoing emergency heart surgery), and Matthew's witty, urbane alter ego, Bertram W. Beath - an erotic opportunist and "passionate spectator" of beauty and human folly. As Peter solicits potential clients for his service, he finds that autobiography requires a measure of deception - well, lying - and that his own life depends on fictions he has created and sustained."--BOOK JACKET.