One could argue that Gray has been writing his last book for years (and for some years, he’s said as much, though always managing to push out something new and even more "last," like the never-ending last tours of The Who).

What makes Grass’s memoir such a compelling and unusual master class in the art of fiction is not that he tells the reader how to write, but he shows, through glimpses, how he himself did it, and specifically, how he wrote his own life into his novels.