SOURCE: Jaffe, Andrew. “Leavable Loves.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (11 June 1989): 1, 8.

In the following review, Jaffe praises the evocative descriptions and attention to detail in My Secret History.

Paul Theroux has written a shelf full of books—25 in all—and unlike Hemingway and Steinbeck, his writing has improved, not diminished with age, as he lets his imagination replay the many adventures of his own wide-ranging life. The result in My Secret History is a wonderful book—no doubt spiced with some elements of autobiography—about the haunting guilt of a young man born Catholic to a family of modest means in suburban Boston as he grows into adulthood and sets off in search of sexual adventure.

Theroux's main character, Andrew Parent, is introduced as an altar boy in his early teens in an era when sticking a hand under a girl's bra was a sin akin, almost, to...