What with Alberto Gonzales getting more mileage out of the phrases “I don’t remember” and “I don’t recall” than anyone since Peter Gabriel, The New Republic decided to have a little fun at his expense with a phony proposal for a Gonzales memoir titled, cutely enough, I Don’t Recall. “Readers of this book will learn what it is like to come from an imperfectly recollected background to reach the highest levels of power in this most powerful of nations,” runs the gag. “The attorney general is also eager to tell the parts of these stories that he is able to reconstruct with some degree of confidence, and to clarify parts on which he could have been clearer or was misunderstood or misinterpreted earlier.”
Should the attorney general ever choose to pitch his memoirs in reality, it’s safe to say his agent probably won’t have Henry Holt—where the parody’s author, David Patterson, works as an editor—on her submissions list. Then again, considering the sorts of books Patterson used to acquire back when he was at PublicAffairs, such a hypothetical agent would probably know better than to make that call in the first place…