Subtitled "The Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich". This isn't the typical "I was born in 1905..." type of autobiography, instead, it's autobiographical essay about different periods of his life, all written between 1961-66, so many years after the events occurred. In the essay entitled "Remington Portable NC69411", Woolrich addresses his favored typewriter, telling it about his family life, his grandfather's upper class home in New York City and his father's simpler life as an ex-pat in Mexico. He recalls the very moment he began writing fiction and the obsession it quickly became, with his first book becoming his first sale to a publisher due to his under-handed friend passing the manuscript on to a publishing house without permission.
Other chapters discuss his first love, a fire in the hotel he and his mother were staying in, and most interesting to me, a chapter on his life during the Great Depression when he went months at a time without selling any work and had his hopes for a book acceptance crushed when he needed it most.

As with any autobiography, this is the author's view and he gets to choose what goes in and what doesn't. As a child being raised by one parent in one country, then the other parent in another country, seeing his wealthy family lose everything in the Depression, living through WWI, he had a survivor mentality and recognized that. He never discusses his brief marriage at all, nor his relationships with men, and he's almost too open about his romances with women. It's clear that Woolrich was writing these essays for an audience and that they weren't just for himself, like a diary. He also never addresses a pretty big question, why he spent nearly thirty years living in various hotel rooms with his mother, and why they lived in ratty places when his estate was valued at $850,000 when he died in 1968. Woolrich was a complex man, sometimes saying one thing, then after, doing the opposite. ( )