So many memoirs are coming out this autumn, written in so many ways.
Neil Patrick Harris, for instance, decided that his early 40s was too young for a “life” story, even for a Tony- and Emmy-winning actor. So he has completed Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography, in which Harris steps back into the second person to allow you to imagine yourself onstage, on television, or, in November 2006, on edge as you prepare to tell the world you’re gay.
“I couldn’t wrap my mind around a structure that made sense to me — to pass on words of wisdom or to write some salacious tell-all. My life hasn’t been like that,” Harris said during a recent interview.
“So I came upon this conceit of ‘choose your own adventure,’ to allow readers to choose which autobiography they were interested in. You can have poignancy, you can have funny remembrances, or whatever path you want to follow.”
Lena Dunham of Girls fame has written Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’, a non-advice advice book in which she hopes that readers will know when and when not to emulate “a girl with a keen interest in having it all”. Amy Poehler’s Yes Please promises a “big juicy stew of personal stories, funny bits on sex and love and friendship and parenthood and real life advice.”
Keith Richards, having taken care of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll in his million-selling Life, turns sentimental with the picture book Gus and Me, a tribute to his grandfather, musician Gus Dupree. Neil Young honours a favourite hobby in Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life and Cars. Jimmy Page is a “photographic autobiography” by the Led Zeppelin guitarist. Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story is not entirely in his own words, alternating between first-person memories and third-person accounts by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author-journalist Rick Bragg.
