BOOKS: The Book of Bob

NEWSWEEK.COM: Bob Dylan is about to publish a remarkably candid, long-awaited memoir. He gave us the first excerpt, and we sat down for an extraordinarily wide-ranging talk.

When I tell Bob Dylan he's the last person I'd have expected to turn autobiographer, he laughs and says, "Yeah, me too." It's not just that he guards his privacy so carefully that he's arranged to meet in a motel room someplace in the Midwest—which is all he'd like us to specify—to talk about his forthcoming book, "Chronicles, Volume One." (Dylan supposedly got in without being spotted, but there's a funny vibe here. Why is our pot of coffee on the house?) His early public persona was built on self-protectively enigmatic statements and artful misdirection, like the yarns he used to tell about being a traveling carny; even Robert Zimmerman's stage name was an invention. And the songs that made Dylan so burdensomely famous—exhibit A, "Like a Rolling Stone," with Miss Lonely, her diplomat and the Siamese cat on his shoulder—seemed to tell his personal truth, and a lot of other people's, by means of surreal evasion. "I'm used to writing songs," he says, "and songs—I can fill 'em up with symbolism and metaphors. When you write a book like this, you gotta tell the truth, and it can't be misinterpreted." He's clearly proud of the book, but he didn't enjoy writing the thing. At all. "Lest we forget, while you're writing, you're not living. What do they call it? Splendid isolation? I don't find it that splendid."

Read the full article in Newsweek here.