How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (1994) [pdf]
Because I find the title gives no indication what to expect, the author is David Foster Wallace, and here&#x27;s the first paragraph:<p>&gt; Because I am a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I&#x27;ve rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin&#x27;s <i>Beyond Center Court: My Story</i>, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow.  This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-&quot;with&quot;-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register.  I think Austin&#x27;s memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.<p>On further reading, wow, that&#x27;s pretty savage.  Sure seems disproportionate to me.  For example, I wonder if you can be as outraged as DFW that:<p>&gt; The author&#x27;s primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends.<p>as opposed to that allegiance being to the reader, whom she owes because, it seems, of the reader&#x27;s interest in her:<p>&gt; Obviously, a good commercial memoir&#x27;s first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who&#x27;s spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet.<p>In fact, as someone who has at times enjoyed DFW immensely, it&#x27;s hard to imagine a writer who writes more for himself than DFW, so the complaint comes across as a bit off-base to me.