Writing about writing is generally as tedious as it is masturbatory, and a successful writer telling the story of his misspent youth is almost invariably worse. Not so with Hand To Mouth, an autobiographical look back on the early "writing career" of Paul Auster. Mercilessly candid and heartbreakingly detailed, Auster's story is about nothing so much as a young man's awareness of money, honed by extreme poverty to a razor edge. Auster had a relatively normal suburban level of well-being as a child and, despite the disastrous consequences of his eventual rebellion against middle-class behavior, writes grimly of his mother's belief in shopping as catharsis, his father's useless frugality, and the showy waste of resources implicit in the family car. Of course, Auster left college determined to make his way in the world as a writer while maintaining his integrity. Not surprisingly, he lost that vision after a couple of vastly entertaining years of falling for scams, bad promises, fruitless interviews, and the usual list of misery. Unlike most grindingly poor young writers, he managed to mix in world travel and attempts to be his own boss, neither of which were good experiences. In the end, and to his horror, Auster discovered that he couldn't even sell out; copies of his detective novel, published under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, are assumed to be taking up space in a Brooklyn warehouse even now. (A reprint is included in its entirety here in an appendix, along with a card game and some other early stabs at making money.) Hand To Mouth is a tale of long and excruciating failure, and Auster deserves some sort of medal for wading through the morass and delivering entertainment, of a sort, as his own expense. He never once tries to shift blame away from himself, and that is, of course, admirable. So is Auster's anecdotal style, and his willingness to relate his story in simple terms, resisting the temptation to draw conclusions or attempt to extract a moral. The beauty of Hand To Mouth—besides knowing that the author did go on to success and acclaim as the author of the great New York trilogy, and of the movies Smoke and Blue In The Face—is in the plain frankness of Auster's pathetic past.