This Is On Me

436 pp. Illustrated by Susanne Suba. 'This is a new kind of book,' proclaims the dust jacket of This Is On Me, and the statement is still true nearly seventy years later. There is yet, as far as I know, another book like this. Time magazine described it as 'scrapbook-diary-letter-what's it-autobiography.' The New Yorker called it 'autobiography-cum-short-stories-cum-articles, complete with anecdotes, divertissements, and funny sayings.' Brush herself said that when she started working on the book, it was a 'sort of a kind of an autobiography' and at the book's very beginning, she refers to it as a 'vast hodgepodge' and a 'shambles.' What it is, more than anything else, is a memoir of Brush's life as a working writer in the 1920s and 1930s, studded with great chunks of what she wrote.