Open: An Autobiography

Ghostwritten with unusual candor by the author of The Tender Bar, Open is far stranger and better than the celebrity-memoir genre suggests. Its real subject is the violence of a father's ambition and the question it leaves: who are you when the thing you are best in the world at is the thing you most resent? Agassi is honest about the costs — the rebellion, the crystal meth, the collapse and the rebuilding — and about the slow discovery of a meaning in the game that he could choose rather than have imposed.

What to attend to: the gap between mastery and ownership — Agassi shows that being made excellent at something is not the same as having chosen it, and that the difference can hollow a person out. The relationship with his father, rendered without the easy comfort of a villain. The late turn, where he finds a reason of his own to play, which is the book's quiet argument about how a life becomes one's own.

In Vela's reading Open sits in the memoir corpus on the work-as-meaning ground and into self-and-identity, beside the other accounts of a self made by labor that was not freely chosen. We read it for the question it sharpens: what it takes to repossess a life that was decided for you.