Essays from a likable 'thief'

Writing, especially memoir, is a complicated kind of theft. You may feel guilty claiming your father's prostate cancer for your narrative, but that doesn't stop you from letting the world know he now wears Depends. Writer Michael Greenberg keenly understands this dynamic. His unflinching -- and riveting -- memoir "Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father's Story of Love and Madness" spared no detail about the summer of his 15-year-old daughter's first manic episode.

In "Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life," his new collection of essays originally commissioned for the Times Literary Supplement, Greenberg picks his own pockets, too.

Set in New York City, Greenberg's elegant stories -- none run longer than 1,200 words -- are stocked with original characters, including an overly enthusiastic dachshund owner and a high-minded group of polyamorists, better known as swingers. Through his interactions with New Yorkers of all stripes, Greenberg tells the story of his life as well as his hometown.

The title works on another level as well: Greenberg often struggles to make ends meet, a fact that seems to please his father, whose scrap metal business lifted his family out of the outer boroughs and into Manhattan.

Greenberg's writing is at its best when describing the soul-crushing details of the writing life. Take this rejection letter he received from a famous editor about his novel: "This manuscript represents everything I hate in fiction. Good luck trying to find it a home." Greenberg is blamed for ruining crappy screenplays he couldn't properly doctor, and scolded by his wife when he breaks out his notebook upon meeting her transgender colleague. Even his beloved writing studio is deemed too seedy to be sublet by a young novelist.

That Greenberg has the humility to bring these details to light makes him a trustworthy and extremely likable narrator. When, in the collection's title story, he recounts running into an old friend and former landlord whom he turned into a minor character in "Hurry Down Sunshine," you reflexively cringe. Greenberg admitted in the memoir that he encouraged his friend's attempts at writing a novel partly in hopes of keeping his own rent down.

In a lesser writer's hands, the moment could be easily overplayed. But Greenberg knows when to pull back the reins. "I wanted to apologize, but it wouldn't have been sincere," he writes. Instead, he tells the old friend he's been thinking of him, to which the friend replies: "Me, too."

Elizabeth Foy Larsen is a Minneapolis writer whose work has appeared in Mother Jones and many other publications.