Winter Journal by Paul Auster: review There comes a point in many established authors" lives when they would benefit from the honesty of a good friend or editor. Paul Auster, heavyweight intellectual, novelist and memoirist, has reached this point. Winter Journal is his second memoir. The first was a searing examination of a strained relationship between emotionally fluid son and bunged-up father. This volume, now Auster has reached his sixties, turns to the author's mortality, his very physicality - the body that is beginning to mark time towards his decline. He addresses his body as "you," and so the reader is included in the solipsistic musings of a 64-year-old man. The first insight that arises is that the author is in remarkably good shape despite some youthful tumbles and sporting accidents, a cigarillo habit, a slight dependency on alcohol and a recent car crash. . "Yes, you drink too much and you smoke too much, you have lost teeth without bothering to replace them, your diet does not conform to the precepts of contemporary nutritional wisdom," he admits, "but if you shun most vegetables it is simply because you do not like them, and you find it difficult, if not impossible, to eat what you do not like." And so he forges on "with vile habits, knowing full well that they will ultimately do grave harm." Many will sigh in sympathy. But Auster is an author famed for devising complex literary structures that deliver moments of bedazzlement. There is a casual tone to the revelations that marks a change in his narrative intent. The inventive capacities have paled, instead Auster focuses on domestic relationships. He is captivating when he remembers his mother. The "you" he addresses fades from view, relieving the reader of an insistent complicity, and Auster delivers instead a tender portrait of a fragile, unhappy woman with a big heart. She is a moving figure in an otherwise static, somewhat complacent family circle. The young Paul Auster, who derived his fame from a potent prose style that imbued mysterious significance into smoky, urban life and rendered the city mythic, has grown into an "international bestselling author" whose accomplishments do not need shoring up. But what is a writer to do but to write? In his native land, Auster has been accused of self-mythologising. Unfortunately, there are too many passages in this meditation on ageing that divulge an embarrassing narcissism. "Looking at your right hand," he tells himself, "as it grips the black fountain pen you are using to write this journal, you think of Keats looking at his own right hand under similar circumstances." At times such as this it is better for you, the reader, to look away. Winter Journal Paul Auster Faber, £17.99, 230pp