Mental note: It’s not a good idea to bring your heroin dealer to work. And it’s even worse to do it while dressed as Osama bin Laden. Especially if it’s Sept. 12, 2001.
This was among the lessons I learned from Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook, the silliest title ever for a book about destabilizing drug and sex addictions. The story would be tragic if it wasn’t so full of wit and insight.
The 33-year-old Brand is already a massive star in England, (this book came out overseas in 2007 and has just been released in the U.S.) but has yet to make it big in the states. His comedic flair, sex appeal and self-deprecating egotism (who knows how he pulls that one off) were on display in last year’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he played rocker Aldous Snow. Given those stateside credentials, this memoir should win over the country in no time.
My Booky Wook, like Motley Crue’s The Dirt, elevates the tell-all celebrity memoir to an art form. But while The Dirt made the reader feel, yes, dirty, Brand’s book never makes us want to wash up after reading it, despite stories of buying prostitutes as a teenager with his father, transporting heroin in the upper reaches of his … lower reaches … and attending the most depressing orgy ever. It transcends smuttiness with silliness.
It is a driving book full of charm and clever turns of phrase that shows a man escaping from a personal hell by sheer force of personality.
What sets My Booky Wook apart from other books in the genre is Brand’s way with words. There is a rhythm to his writing that bounces your mind around without distracting you from the overall point. Excess, whether it’s drugs or sex, might seem fun at first, but it will take over your life before you know it.
Unlike other celebrity memoirs, it is adamantly clear that Brand wrote the book all by himself. The comedian’s Victorian speaking style and thesaurus-seeking word choices make the pages dense but still utterly readable. As an author, Brand is the real deal. It’s no surprise to hear that he has been tapped to write a follow-up.
The memoir follows Brand as he grows up as a chubby troublemaker with a distant dad in Essex, England, to working as a host for MTV in London, where he made the aforementioned Osama faux pas. Along the way he discovers the joy of performing, first as a dramatic actor, then as a stand-up comedian, modeling himself heavily on Bill Hicks.
The early stories of his childhood set the stage for the emotional troubles he finds later in life. One such anecdote—the time when he was molested by a tutor as a young boy—shows that Brand is not scared to confront his demons head on. He refuses to let the trauma win, powering through it with his sense of humor.
“Just a few moments later, he was copping a feel and besmirching the purity of what would later become popularly known as my ball-bags,” he recounts. “As a currency for rewarding academic achievement, I think it’s unlikely to supersede the gold star.”
His stories are sometimes troubling, but they are always funny.
While a majority of the book deals with his addictions and self-destructive tendencies, there is an element of sweetness that is always present. It’s clear that Brand loves his family and friends and that they care about him, even as he unconsciously, or explicitly, tries to sabotage any stability in his life.
But it’s his love for his mother, who through the course of the book battles different forms of cancer, and his beloved grandmother that grounds Brand just when he is close to soaring away on his own flights of fancy.
Now a dedicated 12-stepper, Brand uses his humor as a way of confronting his and life’s many troubles. Shit happens, so you might as well laugh at it.