My Life as a Man Author:Philip Roth My Life as a Man is about the life (real and imagined) of Peter Tarnopol, an esteemed young American novelist, who is obsessed with a subject he can neither master nor abandon - his disastrous efforts to achieve a responsible and virile manhood, particularly in the mortifying marriage that reduced that youthful venture to a travesty of itself. ... more »Tarnopol can think and write of little but his defeat: My Life as a Man is not simply "about" that obsession, it is the testimony to it.« less