Robert Schnakenberg’s new book is a bit like Take Five magazine for literary types. Written in best Fleet Street tabloid trash style, Secret Lives appeals to the worst in us. Did you know that F Scott Fitzgerald and his wife once turned up uninvited to a party, on all fours and barking like dogs? Did you need to know that James Joyce enjoyed bondage, Thomas Pynchon drank his own urine or Walt Whitman had a crush on Abraham Lincoln? I didn’t. I could have gone my whole life without knowing those things and been perfectly happy. But once you start reading it, this book is a bit like a train wreck: you just can’t look away.

Schnakenberg has done his research, presenting each author’s life in a few-page summary and then individual anecdotes in bite-sized chunks with punny headlines. Aside from the trash, he has uncovered genuinely interesting details about some of the Western world’s favourite writers and debunked a few common myths. For example, Ernest Hemmingway never ran with the bulls in Pamplona because leg injuries sustained during World War I meant he couldn’t run. No great scribbler seems safe from Schnakenberg’s wicked pen: Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, JD Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath all cop a serve. Amusing at first, it makes for quite depressing reading by the final page. You could be forgiven for thinking there had never been a great writer or poet who didn’t have a problem with alcohol, mental health, drugs, rampaging egotism, weird sexual fetishes or a combination of the lot. Quirk Books RRP $24.95.