Our 42nd President is famous.

Famous for putting duties off to the last possible moment (and sometimes beyond). Famous, too, for the fact that when he finally gets around to whatever he’s supposed to be doing, be it going after bin Laden or telling the truth, any shortcomings will be excused, rationalized, blamed on others. Most famous, perhaps, for inflicting on one and all the intimacies of a life untidy in the extreme. That’s part of why he’s so hypnotizing. Who can turn away from a 10-car pile-up?

All these traits (and a number of shining ones beside) are neon-lit in My Life , the most exhaustive explication yet of the tangled psyche of William Jefferson Clinton-though assuredly not in ways intended.

Since the Monica dish is the principal reason Knopf’s already booked a record two million–plus orders, let’s get that out of the way first:

Bill had to sleep on the couch for a stretch after fessing up that there was more to his acquaintance with “that woman, Miss Lewinsky” than he’d been letting on-news, he writes, that left Hillary looking “as if I had punched her in the gut.” A year plus of once-a-week, all-day counseling sessions (far more attention than terrorism seemed to be getting at the time) banished the First Lady’s divorce musings.

As for what got him into this fix in the first place, Mr. Clinton unfurls a Couch Canyon laundry list. There’s the “old demons” that have always haunted him; the “parallel lives” he alternates between (sunny on the outside, tormented on the in); the “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” credo he learned as a child; the determination to “drain the most out of every moment of life” that was the legacy of his father’s early death; perhaps even a bit of the fright that Mr. Clinton remembers accompanying his sexual awakenings.

Once the Dr. Phil recitation is over, though, Mr. Clinton piles opprobrium on himself. As he phrased it during his 60 Minutes sit-down with Dan Rather on Su...