Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand

Recounting his struggle with romance, Nathaniel Branden takes us from his teenage fascination with "The Fountainhead" to the height of his career with Objectivism and his affair with the woman who started it all, Ayn Rand. Anyone interested in the people who built this movement will be fascinated with this memoir. The focus of the story is on Branden's marriage with Barbara Branden and his affair with Ayn Rand leading to their eventual break, but the author takes the time to develop the personalities (including his own) that led to this unique, dramatic situation. With the dispositions involved, Branden skillfully unravels the events in a telling worthy of a novel filled with hope, success, and disappointment. In addition, we see Branden balance his professional challenges with psychology, the Collective (a group of Ayn Rand's closest friends), and the Objectivist movement at large. This could have been an angry rant against Ayn Rand, but instead an honest and introspective Branden narrates the story. He admits the mistakes he made and shares blame in the part he plays. There have been other accounts of the story, including a revised version of this memoir entitled My Years with Ayn Rand, but I have not yet read any of these. Certainly I am interested the factuality of Branden's account and will follow up on this, but Branden's sense of drama for these real-life events already makes this book worth reading.

I loved this book. I have always seen Rand as an unbearable narcissist and here is someone finally willing to see through the garbage and call it like it is. Very readable, thought provoking and an interesting peice of history. Ayn Rand cult followers will hate it.

Right now, there is an Ayn Rand explosion. Not only is Rand slowly gaining steam amongst academic thinkers, she is all over popular culture. There has been two successful fims ('The Passion of Ayn Rand' based on Barbara Branden's biography and the Oscar noiminated 'Ayn Rand: a Sense of Life.') Both the Ayn Rand Institute and the Objectivist Center- think-tanks devoted to Ayn Rand's objectivism- are experiencing huge popularity. Heck, today- Aug. 26, 02- C-SPAN will re-air the Ayn Rand episode of their American Writers series. The viewer request was through the roof. So why, with all her idiosyncratic views, can't we seem to get enough? This biography goes a long way in answering that question. Nathaniel Branden, Rand's first 'intellectual heir', takes us on his journey with this enigmatic figure, Rand. From when they first met- he as a college student, she as the successful author of the Fountainhead- to thier intellectual partership and ultimately thier misguided affair. The most interesting part of the book, I feel, is the cacophonic break between Branden and Rand, forcing Branden to reevaluate his life and principles. It would've been easy for Branden, now a successful psychologist, to handle this book badly. It could've wound up being a bitter memoir about what some have called a 'cult'. Or, it could've centered on a philosophical diatribe of Randian thought. Fortunately, it does neither. It is written almost as fiction. The players, even those Branden clearly doesn't like, are treated with respect and empathy. He also writes with remarkable honesty- clearly a sign of a man who's given much time to self-reflection. Yes, there are spots where Branden does get down on Rand. Her philosophy is also touched on, in part. None of this, however, is induldged in to a fault. What we get is the story of a man in a unique, magnanimous, and ultimately life-defining situation. This is one of the few books I've read that I found perfectly enjoyable- emotionally and intelectually- from beginning to end. Also read 'Confessions of a Philosopher" by Bryan Mcgee.

The charming Dr. Branden explains in this sympathetic and heart-wrenching memoir how he was going to bed with three fantastic women simultaneously--his teacher, his wife, and his girlfriend--and, despite the complaisance of the husband of the teacher, and his own wife, and making an exciting living for everyone, and his own notable psychological acumen, simply blew it, and but good.Anyone who wishes to make like the Latin Lover should read this instruction manual of taking a simple matter to FUBAR--and beyond--with care. Still, would those who laugh at Branden and Rand's romantic difficulties been cheered if it had all worked out? No, they would have been denouncing Rand and her menage a cinq as a threat to dull marriages everywhere, that's for sure.What went wrong? I am reminded of the Spanish saying--repeated in the Dorsai series--that who annoys a philosopher annoys the lion in the den. The lioness got annoyed, particularly given her regimen of medicine that made her quite irritable.Branden tells the tale better than expected of people who handled living a fantasy or perhaps a dream better than most. And anyone who has been torn by divided loves, and yet tried to make things work, will be with him. The rest was rotten luck and tuesday night quarterbacking.

Nathaniel Branden has reworked his memoir of his 20 years of romancing the mind of Ayn Rand -- before, during, and after he knew her on a daily and intimate basis -- into a more focused narrative with this second edition.He took the subtitle of the previous edition, made it the title of this one, and jettisoned his use of a famous Rand quote as an epigraph. ("Judge, and be prepared to be judged.") All were wise decisions, because this book is really not about Rand's judgments. They would have been difficult to get past -- especially her final sweeping, damaging, slanderous ones about Branden. But to focus too directly upon them ignores the story line, and it's one of a love story that reads like a novel.Branden fell in love as a teenager with the intellect that shone from "The Fountainhead." And by virtue of his own formidable intellect, along with an uncanny fit into the life of a writer who was missing a genuine challenge and grist in her friendships, he came to love the woman as well. He couldn't handle so many varieties of love at once, and their being present in one skein of interactions that ranged from metaphysics to physical admiration in bed. Such lucid and candid self-admission is what I doubt has been seen this clearly since the extraordinary life of Benvenuto Cellini, in his own famed Renaissance autobiography.For either edition, I couldn't fathom those who see "self-aggrandizement" running rampant on Branden's part. He doesn't minimize his intellect or achievements in publicizing and even, in part, integrating Rand's philosophic work. Nor should he, with the memory hole that Leonard Peikoff and others have erected regarding his role. (I would have been far more bitter than Branden is about such immature revisionist efforts.)If anything, Branden is much too hard on himself, considering the detachment from reality that Rand was capable of creating in her worst moments. He bends over backwards to insist on limning many of her best moments. In how he respects and compactly describes Rand's achievements, he shows that in one sense, his "years with Rand" never really ended. They still live in his mind and heart. What had been added to them, after 1968, were the years of Nathaniel Branden, a person and innovator in psychology that he had suppressed.Branden is, indeed, much less sharp with some of his former associates and "Collective" members than he had been 10 years ago. One exception to Branden's rounder edges, and well aimed in light of 10 years of public absurdity, is with Peikoff. Branden doesn't hesitate to point out the roots of the mess Peikoff has made with the role of Objectivist thought in the wider culture. His own 1950s warnings to Peikoff, his ex-wife's cousin, are even more timely to re-read in light of the many sycophants that Peikoff has gathered to his side. Unlike Branden, Peikoff apparently has never tried to re-own his self.Another decade has also improved Branden's appraisal of