Bookish things and reviews

★★★ ½ ✩✩

I'll preface this with saying I enjoy non-linear memoirs. I feel like it sets a more casual tone and for Val Kilmer that fits better than I expected. His overall manner of speaking in general throughout this book is casual and sometimes lofty. Some might say pretentious and they might be right but what I was hoping for was depth.

He speaks a bit here and there about spirituality, his childhood, his relationships but romantic and friendly, his marriage and the divorce, and his movies in a general way to give you enough of all of that means for him but he never goes into details and I'm not sure whether to applaud him for making a decision to keep somethings private, which we all have the right to, or to shake him because I want to know more details primarily about certain movies and how they were made because I'm curious about some films.

Maybe it's the non linear writing or his choice to not divulge details but there's distance between the reader and Kilmer which I caught halfway through the book. He names drops, as most celebrities do, I find, which is interesting because I had no idea of his dating history outside of Cher and Joanne, whom he married so that was a lot of new info but funny enough not what I was after but it might be for some people. All in all I'm left wanting to talk to him about stuff, art mainly, due to the casual nature of this book, but I was left wanting for more and I'm not sure of what exactly.

Surprising to find that Will Forte and Mare Winningham took turns narrating this audio book. Understandable considering that Kilmer had gone through throat surge so struggled to speak but I say surprising because I'm used to Forte being a big character and so to hear him so serious and yet calming in his turns was nice. Winningham has a great voice for narration and she read what I think were some of the more personal moments or poetry in Kilmer's life and that took a different turn as they knew each other for years and were friends and ex's.