Leave it to former Weekend Update anchor Norm Macdonald to give new heft to the phrase “unreliable narrator.” Exhibit A: his purported memoir, titled “Based on a True Story.” Among other things, the Canadian-born stand-up comic describes snagging his “SNL” spot after laying some drugs on producer Lorne Michaels. So, what percentage of this “memoir” is actually true? “Oh, zero,” Norm tells The Post. “I wanted to write a novel, but they wouldn’t let me. But there are facts in the book that are true, [like] ‘a river is made of water.’ ” Writes Amy Schumer in one of the book’s many ecstatic celebrity blurbs: “This book was such a great read, I forgot how lonely I was for a while.”
Here’s what’s in Macdonald’s library. Really!
I watched the Watergate hearings while I was a boy in Canada. They said Nixon was the ultimate politician, but no: He was stiff, he’d sweat, he was human, a tragic figure who got caught up in his own insecurities. My favorite part [in these tapes] is the banality: Nixon talks about his mother-in-law making this pie he f—–g hates, and all these guys going, “Yessir!”
I love oral histories. Mitchell was a New Yorker writer who’d go around a city and write about interesting people he’d met, from the mayor to the lowest bum. He was probably the first to do New Journalism, [before] Gay Talese. His character stuff is like the best stuff you’d ever read. You wonder, why didn’t he ever write a novel?
There are seven volumes, and I’m in the third one now. It’s insanely good. Proust writes it at the speed of time. There’ll be like 30 pages explaining how he wakes up, his eyes open, and a dream comes back and goes away again. Sometimes I’ll read it out loud, because he’s put so much into it.
If you have a deeper understanding of Christianity than is stylish nowadays, you’ll see that the Huey Long character believes in original sin, and the Calvinist view that everything’s bad and you can only make something good from using bad. The narrator learns you can’t remain neutral. People might want to read this now during this election season.
