As is probably clear from the title, this is an autobiography. But it's also a book which cannot really be thought about independently from its specific form, and how it both makes it more fun and more interesting and also, in my experience of it, distances the reader from the subject in a way that's a curious choice for a biography!
Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.
The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.
The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.
Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.
Grade: B
Neil Patrick Harris is a former child star who got new life as an actor in his twenties and thirties on both a sitcom and Broadway. He's also openly gay and married to a man with whom he has two children, and the story of how he was outed and then more or less required to be an out public figure feels both quaint in 2018 and also is a good representation of how much has changed and also how much hasn't. This book was published in 2014, and much like Possible Side Effects (although even more startlingly, given how much closer in time it is to the present), the book reads like a tiny time capsule. There are bits and sections of this book that I cannot imagine being edited in the same way if it had been published today, and there's a security in what the future will look like that feels hard to remember experiencing from this vantage point.
The format of the book is to tell the biography in the same way as the Choose Your Own Adventure books did, where the reader gets to the end of a chapter and then decides what they what to happen next in the story. There are two problems with this format for an autobiography. One is practical: there is only one actual narrative to follow, and it's what really happened, and the book isn't constructed in a way to actually get the reader to experience all of the book unless you don't actually follow the paths, which feels poorly constructed! If you're going to make it into a game of sorts, it should actually work.
The second problem is bigger, which is that the story is told in the second person POV, since the conceit is that you are NPH and are choosing what will happen, etc. The problem with this in an autobiography is that it distances the reader from the subject in a way that's difficult to ever bridge successfully. It made me feel like NPH didn't actually have to reveal himself or his experiences in a way that wasn't artificial. I know more about what has happened in his career and life, but I don't actually feel like I know him better, and while that may mean that he feels like he succeeded, it's not what I want from an autobiography. I wanted less gimmick and more introspection, I guess.
Having said all that, it was still worth reading in the end, even if it made me feel like 2014 was forty years ago rather than only four.
Grade: B
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