The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of an author who reshaped the idea of fiction - a work of captivating irony and inventiveness, which reveals, in a particularly instructive way, the interaction between life and art.
Philip Roth narrates five episodes from his life: his secure childhood years in America in the 1930s and 1940s; his initiation into American life at a conventional university in the 1950s; his passionate and destructive bond with the most angry person he has ever known, when he is an ambitious young man (Roth calls her "the girl of my dreams"); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with the scandalized Jewish establishment that has been scandalized by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, amidst the excesses of the 1960s, of the rich, unexplored vein of his talent, which led him to write Portnoy's Complaint.

The book concludes with a surprise that bears Roth's unmistakable stamp: the novelist's persistent attack on his autobiographical self, with a strong questioning of his adequacy as an author of self-narrative.