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I’m a sucker for celebrity memoirs. I love the peek into their lives and I relish in learning their histories. I’m curious and a bit of a voyeur. I was most likely going to read Neil Patrick Harris’s bio eventually anyway. But the premise was so clever —it’s a choose your own adventure book! — I knew reading it would happen sooner rather than later.
It comes in two formats — print and audio — and for this experience I chose audio, which turned out to be a fantastic way to experience this book. On the one hand, I missed out on the whole “choose your own” part; because of the nature of audiobooks, Harris just read the book straight through, without jumping around. Which means I experienced the fake endings as they came, instead of following through paths. And because of this, it did get somewhat difficult to tell what stories were Truth and which were Fiction.
But the positives completely offset the negatives in this listening experience. For one: Harris narrates the book and he’s brilliant. He does voices (the announcer voice is the best!) and clips (the best one is the audio of 13-year-old Neil doing a speech on optimism) and the vocal annotation of David Burtka in the chapter on how they met was simply adorable.
I loved every moment I spent listening to it. The format (using second person instead of presenting it as “this is my life”) involved me, and on top of that NPH has a wonderful sense of humor and gratitude about his life. Maybe it’s not great literature, but it was a truly enjoyable book to read/listen to.
Rated: High for eight f-bombs and some frank (but not graphic) descriptions of his sexual experiences as he was trying to figure himself out.
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