PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)While Conaboy’s impetus for writing Mother Brain was to understand her experience, there is also a strong political message ... While postwar parents revelled in the \'trust yourself\' mantra of Benjamin Spock and anxious Gen-Xers found comfort in William and Martha Sears’s all-breastfeeding attachment parenting, Mother Brain feels like a book that will inspire today’s new parents: socially alert, inclusive, kind. There are places where the science is still evolving, but Conaboy at least promises a new route through the parenting wilds.
Viola Davis
RaveThe Sunday Times (UK)... no self-congratulatory showbiz rags-to-riches tale, a sparkly redemptive arc where success heals old wounds. Instead it’s a book committed to showing how deeply poverty, racism, sexism and violence can seep into a person’s bones, a challenge to the conventional feelgood narrative of triumphant escape ... You can almost feel the cortisol and adrenaline flooding these pages ... For all its pain, there is joy in Finding Me — the adoption of her daughter, Genesis, marriage to the actor Julius Tennon — and Davis writes about her parents with clear-eyed compassion ... her desire to write more than a standard showbiz memoir is possibly clearest in the sheer physicality of this book ... Not many Hollywood stars talk about bunions, but Davis is there, encouraging the reader to walk in her shoes. If there’s an occasional tinge of Hollywood therapy-speak to Finding Me, it’s an understandable part of Davis’s mission to show the whole woman, to reveal what being \'exceptional\' really takes — and who it leaves behind.
Hannah Gadsby
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)In part Ten Steps to Nanette functions as a bleak artist’s notebook, an account of how she ended up on stage at the Sydney Opera House that January, as well as an almost conventional \'memoir situation\' ... She writes beautifully about her culturally stodgy childhood ... This book is more than a Nanette expansion pack: parts of it easily stand alone. She writes about her autism with a zoomed-in brightness ... Yet it does demand readers are as fascinated by the whirr of her processes as she is ... Bluntly, whether you love this book will depend on your attitude towards a footnote saying \'I’m triggering all of the warnings\', but as a document of what can happen when a different kind of voice seizes the conversation, Ten Steps to Nanette shows Gadsby taking control of the page along with the stage.
Mel Brooks
PositiveThe Times (UK)... [a] bouyant memoir ... He is never one to restrain himself from quoting praise ... When he slows down he offers tremendous insights into his work ... He brilliantly catches a lost world of postwar showbusiness, describing the writers’ room coffee and doughnuts, the deli bagels and lox, the smell of cigar smoke and bananas Foster. You can almost feel the red velvet banquettes. He’s astute on the structure of his comedy too, tying it in to the fact he was also a drummer ... The chapters on his most successful films are generous to the performers around him ... It’s testament to Brooks that you read All About Me! in his voice, but you can’t help wondering what masterpiece of comic writing he might have created if he’d applied his History of the World, Part One strategies to his own past. Instead he’s happy to describe things as \'hilarious\' without necessarily making them so. After reading this book it’s hard not to fall into Brooks’s punchy style and phrase everything like a cinema poster tagline—and sure enough, if you like Brooks, you’ll love this.
Esther Freud
PositiveThe Times (UK)While its delicate account of unmarried motherhood and some stickily yearning sex scenes are unlikely to see it concealed on any modern bookshelf, Esther Freud’s ninth novel catches at this postwar moment when women balanced on the cusp of something that looked like liberation ... . In I Couldn’t Love You More , however, family becomes a fierce craving for those unwillingly wrenched from it ... The sharp intimacy of the writing is sometimes blunted by the story’s overfamiliarity ... Yet Freud’s story remains one worth telling, full of compassion and — regardless of what Haughey may have thought — a profound decency.
Sinéad O'Connor
PositiveThe Times (UK)\"... a memoir that, keeping company with its remarkable author, manages to be both fractured and fierce ... Vindications, then, could have been an alternative title for this book, an autobiography that settles scores with almost Morrissey-like zeal, yet maintains an appealing I’d-say-it-to-their-face honesty ... her voice comes through clearly—funny and uncowed. There are heartfelt passages on guardian angels and spiritual manifestations, but there is also robust discourse on tour bus lavatory etiquette and on-the-road sex. If it’s revealing, it’s not uncontrolled: as a singer she knows when to grow loud and when to drop to a lyrical whisper ... The book does lose shape towards the end: a victim, she says, of her weed-smoked memory and mental health issues. Yet there is still illuminating discussion ... O’Connor gets you onside so completely with her direct narrative, you feel you could be in the same room as her. Because of that, you feel genuine warmth towards those who are kind to her ... Rememberings stands as a hard-fought, self-built monument to someone who did it her way.
Sharon Stone
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)... unpredictable energy. [Stone\'s] writing can be electrifying, especially when she’s describing her early life or her illness; at other times, a drizzle of Hollywood spirituality and cosmic learning dims the brightness ... She cheerfully admits she could be seen as a “quirky broad”, an endearing impression strengthened by her more robust writing, the brisk, gum-popping aphorisms issued as if she’s sparring with Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant ... She knows how to focus, understands how to frame a terrible scene ... all over the place — a passage about spending 1984 in Zimbabwe shooting King Solomon’s Mines, all Congolese black hash and terrifying hospitals, demands another book, while her description about her \'life of service\' is a textbook illustration of the queasy interplay between charity and celebrity, and what happens when Madonna is late for a fundraising gala. Yet it leaves the righteous impression of somebody who knows her own value, who understands Basic Instinct is \'about more than just a peek up my skirt, people\' and who knows the power of women getting mad and getting even. \'No, I didn’t get the fairy tale,\' she writes. \'I got real life.\' Even through the Hollywood filters, it’s there on every page.
David Thomson
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)... characteristically idiosyncratic ... While the book outlines developments in the director’s role over 100 years — technician, entertainer, artist, rock star, merchandiser — Thomson goes deeper to identify the wider effects of their work on the human psyche ... If he betrays a little queasiness about applying new standards to old films, he’s not blindly protecting toxic cinematic monuments either ... The pictures are smaller, maybe, but with this dynamic book Thomson is big enough to follow the cry of \'action!\' wherever it leads.
Michael Leviton
PositiveThe Times (UK)To Be Honest could be the treatment for a Truman Show-style comedy—what happens if you cannot tell a lie?—yet it is also an uneasy family memoir, its eccentricity sometimes jack-knifed by sadness ... Leviton’s writing shares space with David Sedaris, hilariously aware of other people’s failings yet eager to drag his unsavoury traits into the light and offer them up for the reader’s appalled delectation. As Leviton’s dad would probably point out, there are flaws—the indie-film romance with Eve becomes repetitive, and it would be fascinating to hear more from his younger siblings. Yet, like its author, To Be Honest is an open book, exposing not only one man’s personal struggle with the truth, but also the millions of little social contracts that bounce and stream between us every second.
Mariah Carey, with Michaela Angela Davis
RaveThe Times (UK)Only the wildest gambler, then, would have put money on The Meaning of Mariah Carey being such a perfectly pitched modern pop autobiography, addressing tough, timely issues of racism, sexism, power and trauma with humanity and candour. Impressively co-written with the \'image activist\' and editor Michaela Angela Davis, it isn’t quite a gritty misery memoir — Carey sparkles too hard for that — but the flawless pop star image often rubs away to show real pain ... This is, ultimately, a high-spec survivor’s tale and if it occasionally becomes schmaltzy or self-serving — an eye-to-eye moment of understanding with Princess Diana across a crowded charity ball; recognition from the rapper Tupac Shakur — it’s balanced by surprising self-awareness and a willingness to show exactly where she came from ... There’s a strong sense throughout this book that the diva might fall under this category herself; she cracks enough jokes to suggest she would be great fun over an unguarded bottle of wine ... Yet if at times it seems a shame she hasn’t gone the full Elton John — dialling up the indiscretion, naming more names — it’s because there’s a real seriousness to this tale of transformation, not so much a miracle as real-life escape. With The Meaning of Mariah Carey, she proves once again that she is what she has always wanted to be: a class act.
Chris Frantz
MixedThe Sunday Times (UK)Uxoriousness is rarely considered a cardinal rock’n’roll virtue, yet, creditably, Frantz uses Remain in Love to highlight Weymouth’s importance to Talking Heads ... There is a righteous rebalancing to Remain in Love, then, yet tangled up with this love story is one that looks a lot more like hate ... Frantz is explicit he has axes to grind ... Frantz is too well brought up to turn his book into an openly vengeful bloodbath, but even so he isn’t afraid to slide a blade between Byrne’s ribs, not always as subtly as he thinks ... It’s often unintentionally funny, though ... Frantz writes in thumping four-to-the-floor prose that often reads like an annotated tour diary: a visit to Stonehenge with the Ramones here, excitable Italian fans there ... However, Frantz’s inner-circle, right-time-right-place status lends him a stash of great anecdotes, suggestive of the era’s downtown crosscurrents ... Yet...Remain in Love leaves a bitter aftertaste. The band politics are, despite the cheery gloss, poisonous ... reading Remain in Love often feels like looking at a photo album in which someone has cut all the heads off an estranged lover, a vacancy that draws the eye. Frantz has done an effective job of rebalancing the Talking Heads story, offering an angle on the band that fans will relish, but, oddly for a drummer, he’s sacrificed something of the heartbeat.
Robert Kolker
RaveThe Times (UK)In this fascinating yet deeply disturbing book, the journalist Robert Kolker burrows deep into the issue of nature versus nurture. As with his previous outing, Lost Girls , about a series of murders on Long Island, it’s a work of precise reportage: he spoke to all the surviving members of the Galvin family, including matriarch Mimi before her death in 2017, creating a startlingly intimate account of a family ruptured from within by forces they could not control. From the name of the Galvins’ street to their love of falconry, an exercise in controlling wildness, the material often has an uncanny, novelistic quality. At times it’s reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides : an all-American family, an inexplicable contagion, a malignant turning inwards, all against a backdrop of respectable conformity ... Kolker, careful and compassionate, hasn’t turned Hidden Valley Road into a pure horror story, but by revealing the Galvins’ remarkable circumstances, he shows just how delicately balanced a family, a mind — a whole life — can be.
Hadley Freeman
RaveThe Times (UK)A biographer’s gift, [Alex] later became an art dealer, befriending Picasso and living in a home full of works by Matisse, Manet and Renoir ... His story glitters, but there are other biographical riches. Henri pioneered microfilm — a spy story itself — and spent the war hiding in Paris with his wife Sonia ... Bearing witness is a powerful motive, but Freeman also frames House of Glass as a warning against a backdrop of rising nationalism and anti-semitism across the world ... \'Haunting\' is an insufficient description of House of Glass. It lingers, chilling the room ... Yet it’s not a book of ghosts; these people exist in high definition, Freeman catching their foibles, feuds, physical quirks and flashes of heroism. Researched with diligence and written with love, it triggers the same shock of recognition that comes from colourised film ... House of Glass opens the door on to the past, and its light spills sharply across the present.
Kirstin Innes
MixedThe GuardianFishnet – alluring, dangerous, entangling – is driven by a campaigning energy, but it is so keen to emphasise that not all sex workers are damaged, vulnerable streetwalkers that it can become clangingly polemical ... The mystery generated around Rona, however, is beautifully unsettling, while the depiction of Fiona’s empty world – failing Facebook friendships, cavernous glass-fronted bars and concrete austerity-struck business zones – shows off Innes’s gift for describing the mundane as well as the exotically marginal.
John Savage
PositiveThe Times (UK)This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else...walks familiar ground, then. Yet the oral-history format lends a warmth and flexibility that prevents it becoming just another grim rattle of the ossuary. The band are natural raconteurs, dry, funny, self-aware, and the testimony of friends, associates and \'witnesses\' adds new perspective ... What comes across strongly here, however, is how painfully young they all were, how ill-equipped to help, how deeply regretful afterwards ... This Searing Light, the Sun and Everything Else, though, once again lets the life back into the story. It’s all the more devastating for that.
Danny Goldberg
PositiveThe Times (UK)\"Goldberg’s game isn’t painting Cobain as a cynical bread-head—the manager is often as starry-eyed as any fan at his subject’s creative gifts and he clearly loved the man—yet he does take strong issue with those who insist Cobain was an unhappy victim of the machine ... In a letter to the singer-songwriter Juliana Hatfield, Cobain described Goldberg as \'the most honest man in showbiz.\' Serving the Servant brings that clarity and insight to Nirvana’s frequently rehashed story, sharpening the edges of Cobain’s image 25 years after his death, removing the soft-focus \'legend\' filter to bring the complicated man briefly into view.\
Ray Connolly
PositiveThe Sunday TimesConnolly...takes a sensible route down the path dividing the saint and the monster in this careful, thoughtful biography ... Connolly wears his acquaintance lightly, never forcing himself into the narrative or sinking into the hideous mateyness that can blight rock biographies. It explains, too, why the Lennon captured here feels so warm to the touch ... For Connolly, it is Lennon’s insecurities that are ultimately most revealing, rooted in an unsettled childhood in Liverpool’s postwar suburbs ... for anyone interested in the Beatles, their story has something of the infinite flexibility of fairy tale or Arthurian legend, able to withstand endless retellings ... Connolly does all this with quiet expertise, an understated writer who collates all the details into a vivid whole ... neither hatchet job nor hagiography, Being John Lennon swerves dead-hero worship.
Roger Daltrey
PositiveThe TimesThe Who were youthful agents of the incoming counter-culture, but Daltrey was a child of a keep-calm-and-carry-on era, and this stocky, muscular narrative reveals a no-nonsense approach to his life and work ... The Who continued, though, and the pride Daltrey takes in it is fierce. Yet as the book progresses, there’s a sense that he really found himself beyond the band: in his solo work, his second wife, Heather, his acting career, his much-mocked trout fishing ... He did eventually take acid, accidentally drinking a spiked cup of tea at Woodstock. Like so much in his story, it’s a perfectly ordinary way of falling into the extraordinary.
Matthew Polly
PositiveThe TimesMatthew Polly’s muscular biography of Lee could feel like a tragedy ... Yet despite his death, this book succeeds in capturing his energy and achievements, a volley of incident that rarely lets up ... Polly is, however, as keen to unpick myths as make them and he dedicates a chapter to the day Lee died ... This isn’t a subtle book, but for anyone curious about Lee’s legacy, it’s a roundhouse kick of a biography.
