Is the partly-nonfiction Gay Talese book about the sex-peeping Colfax motelier any good?

Author Gay Talese disavowed his own book, but critics won’t!

Dave Burdick

Jul. 11, 2016, 12:57 p.m.

Hey! Remember when everybody got all fired up because of that book being written by famous journalist/author Gay Talese about a motel on Colfax owned by a guy who kept a notebook all about the sex he watched through peepholes he’d installed?

And remember when the peeper guy started getting death threats about it?

And remember when everybody got all fired up again because, wah-wah, it probably wasn’t all… true?

“I should not have believed a word he said,” the 84-year-old author said after The Washington Post informed him of property records that showed Foos did not own the motel from 1980 to 1988.

Well, do you wonder if “The Voyeur’s Motel” is any good?

USA Today: No, it’s gross.

NYT: No, but it feels like you’re really there with that creep and also we want to have it both ways.

Kirkus: Yes.

Publisher’s Weekly: Not really.

Verdict: Gay Talese disavowed his book, and then un-disavowed it — reavowed it? — and critics feel basically the same way.

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"They created something that is just theirs. Nobody else created this. And maybe it didn’t even come out how they wanted it. That’s part of life, too, where you put in all your efforts, and it wasn’t quite what you wanted, or you messed up somewhere along the way. But at the end, you still had something that you were proud of.”

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