Richard B. Wright’s eloquent memoir of his life as a novelist and teacher is written in the third-person singular. This gives it a big advantage. By referring to himself as “he” rather than “I,” the author constructs a bridge of memory that both separates and connects the mature Wright – the one who’s doing the writing – with the Wright who’s being written about (whose youth and adolescence dominate the first half of the book). At several points, Wright describes a scene from his earlier days and then shows us how and why the same incident found its way into one of his novels, magically transformed by the imaginative process.

In a few cases, however, his reliance on third-person narration makes for moments of confusion. Here’s an example: Wright is describing his days working at Macmillan of Canada, where “Kildare Dobbs had been replaced by James Bacque, who came from the magazine world. By then, however, at John Gray’s urging, he had moved from the Editorial Department into sales. Gray told him that he had a promising career in publishing.” Is Gray talking to Bacque, or maybe even Dobbs? No, he’s saying this to Wright.

Wright grew up in Midland, Ontario, on Georgian Bay, “conscious of how most people around him regarded outlandish ambition.” He paints it as a grim place in which to endure a bleak childhood with anti-intellectual working-class parents: a puritanical mother given to fantasy, and a paternal line, a century removed from Ireland, who were “by and large an opinionated, judgmental, and quarrelsome lot.”

This part of the story, rich in period detail, anxiety, longing, and spiritual confusion, beautifully recalls the WASP novels of a certain generation. But it is a testament to Wright’s talent that though he has acknowledged that tradition, he has always been a highly inventive and ambitious novelist, expert at high seriousness, satire, and most everything in between. All of this is held together by one unmistakable consciousness – humane, humanistic, conservative, a bit crotchety perhaps, and now understandably proud of his achievements (for example, winning the Giller Prize, the Trillium Award, and a Governor General’s Literary Award for the novel Clara Callan).

A Life with Words isn’t a memoir of being around other writers. Quite a few of Canada’s notable literary figures are mentioned – Mavis Gallant, Mordecai Richler, and Robert Fulford, for example – but they are rarely sketched. Rather, this is a memoir of the writing life. As it moves along from job to job, place to place, book to book, it builds a realistic mosaic of failures and successes, both solitary and public. The trend, however, is always upward, and the pace steady, though the process must have seemed agonizingly slow and demoralizing at the time. One can hardly criticize the author, now 78, for enumerating his prizes and honours and including photographs of himself standing next to various governors general.

If anyone in A Life in Words is held up as the hero, it’s Phyllis Bruce, who published Clara Callan at HarperCollins Canada. The present book, not incidentally, is the first title under Bruce’s eponymous new imprint at S&S.