Fans [Eilish's] own age will especially love Billie Eilish a sumptuous book of photographs chronicling her life and career from infancy to the present ... Billie Eilish offers a more vulnerable portrayal of the star ... Little written text accompanies these pictures. This may not matter much to younger fans [...] But adults may prefer to skim the pages while listening to the commentary, which provides some context if not much insight into Eilish’s career.
The difference between the O’Connell family’s photo album and yours or mine is that they had the business savvy to publish it at the usual steep price of a famous person’s hardcover release. No one wants to see my baby photos, yet even Eilish skeptics will find her massive collection of old photos worth flipping through—if only to challenge their mindsets. There are nearly 350 pages of photos in Billie Eilish by Billie Eilish, ranging from never-before-shared pics of smiley baby Billie to more familiar shots from photo ops or fashion shoots. Although the book has been marketed as a cross between a photo book and a memoir, it falls firmly in that former camp. Flipping through the pages is like watching a beloved teen pop star grow up before your eyes, an evolution that is particularly fascinating when it’s that of Billie Eilish ... Eilish is such an intriguing public figure, yet when she has a chance to put forth a tome cataloging the creation of this image, she offers little to justify or prove what makes her intriguing in the first place.
[A]n actual memoir of sorts, simply titled Billie Eilish, a book of photographs with sporadic, pithy captions. If any teenager could pull off telling the story of her life thus far, surely it is Eilish, whose youth is at once a huge asset to her art (she speaks the language of now intuitively) and immaterial to it ... It’s jarring to see someone so invested in complexity release a book this basic. Imagine if the glossy insert of relevant pictures tucked into most celebrity memoirs were the whole book and you have a good idea of this one ... Eilish’s narration is unpretentious, sometimes to a fault ... More frustrating than a lack of insight is a repeated inability to put her thoughts into words.
