Actually a lot of it is the sort of retrospective wankery that successful authors frequently seem to drift toward in their late careers. You might like it if you love author commentaries, John Irving, and Charles Peepeeens, and if you don't you might still like something in it, but this is a shitpost, not a review.

The eponymous story is high quality dramalit.

You can read the whole thing here in the NYT archives

It starts with Irving's recollections of his childhood summers in New Hampshire, of long days spent running around with the boys, avoiding neighborhood dogs, and bullying an r-slured pig farmer named Piggy Sneed. The narrative ends with adult Irving watching that same r-slurred pig farmer burn to death while he spins a yarn to the other bystanders about how Piggy Sneed actually escaped the inferno and moved to Europe. When the fire burns out, Irving is tasked with scraping the charred r-slur corpse up from the ashes.

What makes "Trying to Save Piggy Sneed" dramapilled is the Shyamalan-level twist in the final act. The main anecdote of the essay could have existed on its own as a compelling, albeit somewhat tasteless piece on human ugliness and that very relatable sentiment of feeling kind of bad that you don't feel very bad about something. Instead, Irving uses it as a vehicle to present some hackneyed and self-obsessed musings on his role as an author because surprise! This is actually one of those autofellating memoirs where writers write about writing!

Piggy Sneed is a hilariously fricked amalgamation of disturbing personal story and tedious thinkpiece that manages to be less than the sum of its parts, but is more entertaining for it. Irving's sense of detachment from the events he's mining to fabricate an origin story for himself makes this read like an unintentional parody of the sort of neoconfessional slop that you'll be familiar with if you took a college English class or read a lit mag at any point in the last 15ish years.

It also sort of reminds me of that David Sedaris book where he uses his sister's suicide to brag about his beach house. And maybe that isn't a fair characterization of a book I didn't read all the way through, but if any of you are middlebrow New Yorker-brained Sedaris enjoyers and feel like concisely explaining how I'm wrong then maybe I'll read it.

Anyway I'm losing the plot here so I'm going to post this without wrapping it up