One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool ... The book reads like a novelization of [Almost Famous], so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own ... There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core. God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway.
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