My Secret History was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1989. Andre Parent is transparently Paul Theroux — a Catholic boy from Medford, Massachusetts, who joins the Peace Corps, teaches in Africa, becomes a novelist in London, travels obsessively, and conducts affairs that eventually destroy his marriage. The “secret history” is the life behind the published life: the infidelities, the lies, the emotional cost of turning everyone you know into material.
The novel is divided into five sections spanning thirty years, each capturing a phase of Andre’s life: his Catholic boyhood and loss of faith; his Peace Corps years in Africa; his early marriage and literary struggles in London; his success as a travel writer; and the unraveling of his family when his wife discovers his affairs.
Theroux’s then-wife Anne recognized herself (she later confirmed this in interviews after their divorce), and the novel was understood as a confessional act disguised as fiction. The most painful sections detail how Andre simultaneously loves his family and is incapable of fidelity — not from lust but from the writer’s pathological need for experience, for material, for lives other than his own.
Collecting My Secret History
First edition (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1989): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- UK first edition, fine in jacket: $20–$40
- US first edition (Putnam): $15–$30