Through a series of improbable coincidences, in the early 1970s Harry Mathews, then living in France, was commonly reputed to be a CIA agent. Even his closest friends had their suspicions, which were only reinforced each time he tried to deny such a connection. With growing frustration at his inability to make anyone believe him, Mathews decided to act the part.

My Life in CIA documents Mathews's experiences as a would-be spy during 1973, where amid charged world events—the coup in Chile, Watergate, the ending of the Vietnam War—he found himself engaged in a game that took sinister twists as various foreign agencies were interested in him for their own dubious purposes. Harry Mathews has turned these strange events into a spellbinding thriller that relentlessly blurs the line between fact and fiction.