Posted by Ok, so I love Eddie Izzard, my husband and I have watched his stand ups several times over and they just stay funny and entertaining to us.
I wasn’t sure what to expect out of the book, sometimes comedians autobiographies read much like their stand ups, other times they read much more like a standard biography.
This one definitely has Eddie’s stand up vibe to it. I listened to the audiobook and he went off script on basically every page leaving you with long “never ending” foot notes.
I’ve read some reviews from people who say the book is too rambling and they were going to try the audiobook – sorry folks, but it gets more rambly. He actually had someone google something for him in the audiobook recording session and they kept it in instead of editing it. That kind of stuff.
That said, I don’t mind the rambling, it’s part of the charm to his stand up, and since I listened to the guy perform the book himself it all worked out just fine for me.
He’s pretty honest about his childhood, and where he did well and when he did embarrassing shit, or immature shit. The parts about the death of his mother were rather emotional, some of the stories from his boarding school were rather funny or awkward and all the while it was entertaining, I definitely had some laugh out loud moments.
I’m not giving it 5 stars though because it jumped around a LOT, for example when he was talking about his mother he would tell a story where she died… and then later on go into a memory of his mother before she died, so the timeline was jumping back and forth and it was a touch hard to follow at points. I may have actually done better with the book in this respect.
If you like Eddie Izzard and want to know more about him, I would recommend this as long as you know ahead of time that it wanders a bit.
Final Score: 8/10