Stories I Only Tell My Friends (Rob Lowe)

In this memoir, Lowe tells how he knew he wanted to be an actor from age 6, and fought single-mindedly to make that happen. He writes fairly openly about his difficulties with relationships and with alcohol that led to a downward spiral, and about the redemption that turned his life around. There is a great deal of name-dropping, but this is to be expected from someone whose middle-school friends included Charlie Sheen and Sean Penn. Aside from a disconcerting tendency to switch from past tense to present, the writing is quite good. He describes drunken evenings with his gang of friends, living for weeks in Paris with a princess, and other debaucheries without avoiding them but also without sensationalism or meanness. It is a good look at a life most of us will never know.