ABSTRACT
Philip Roth has belatedly transgressed the boundaries between art and life and with authority of an "artist familiar with the ways of the imagination". The autobiography is the ordinary life of the writer in which demonic and imaginative characters like Josie act out their destructive careers, "redeemed" only by the capacity of fiction to reenact the demons in the novelist's imagination. Autobiography is fact, fiction imagination, so Philip Roth tells his character Nathan Zuckerman in a letter that prefaces Roth's novelist's autobiography The Facts. But the facts/fiction distinction is problematic and Roth knows it. Perhaps the clue to an understanding of the therapeutic function of autobiography lies in Roth's imaginative practice. The Facts tells us what we may have sensed but not fully realized, namely that for Roth the fictional imagination is the opposite of the therapeutic: the imagination eviscerates, it does not heal.
