Confessions of Zeno

An aging businessman undertakes an unusual assignment: to write his life story for his psychoanalyst. What begins as a therapeutic exercise quickly becomes a candid, witty, and often contradictory record of memory, self-deception, desire, and regret. Even the doctor presenting these pages warns that the narrator’s “truths and falsehoods” may reveal more than he intends.

Zeno looks back on the habits and decisions that have shaped him, including his long, absurd struggle to give up smoking and his uneasy attempts to understand the people closest to him. He is intelligent enough to question his own motives, but not always honest—or perhaps not always capable of being honest—with himself. The result is an intimate psychological portrait, lightly comic and richly observant, inviting listeners to decide where confession ends and invention begins.