Some 20 years ago, the best-selling writer Gay Talese found himself in the waiting room of a renowned Upper East Side Freudian. Talese had been taking a decade or more to finish his books, and he was here to find out why. The door opened: Out walked Al Pacino, and in strolled Talese. After several dozen appointments, the grandfatherly psychiatrist believed he'd isolated the problem: Gay Talese, he'd decided, was "a perfectionist."

"That's a problem?" Talese remembers saying in disbelief. Perhaps a female would be better able to find and set the broken bone. I can be very private with a woman, Talese thought. Two lady shrinks and a ripped-up Prozac prescription later, Talese decided he was making himself crazy with this stuff. "I have a way of working," he said. "And it's not going to change."

One day, it would make a decent subject for a book: Thirteen years aborning, A Writer's Life has finally been delivered to its publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. It's a book about vacillation. It's a book about what Talese frankly calls his "time-wasting opportunities." It's a book about the writer's woven-tapestry takes on this subject or that, tales that had never quite made the jump from Talese's file cabinets, a book about not writing a book that manages to entertain anyway.

The proprietors of a jinxed restaurant space; the racially roiled citizenry of Selma, Alabama; the soccer player who lost the Women's World Cup final for China; John and Lorena Bobbitt—all unburden themselves in the pages of A Writer's Life to this son of a Calabria-born tailor, who, in that familiar suit and tie and waistcoat, has always looked like a prosperous railroad man. Never in his life has Talese put on a pair of blue jeans, not as a young sportswriter for The New York Times in the fifties or as a star at Esquire in the sixties, where he specialized in charming stories out of the hard-to-get. Smart clothes hand-stitched by his Cristiani cousins in Paris helped him make the sale.

"Frank Sinatra was no fun. Joe DiMaggio was no fun. Muhammad Ali, that was work," he remembers. But Peter O'Toole taught him something: how it never hurt to order a shot of recklessness. In 1963, O'Toole was shocked to hear that Talese and Nan, his wife, didn't want children. "Man, you worry too much," the genial Irish reprobate counseled. "Why don't you just do it?"