neil patrick harris: choose your own autobiography

neil patrick harris: choose your own autobiography
neil patrick harris
autobiography/audiobook
crown archetype
published 2014

Sick of deeply personal accounts written in the first person? Seeking an exciting, interactive read that puts the “u” back in “aUtobiography”? Then look no further than Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography! In this revolutionary, Joycean experiment in light celebrity narrative, actor/personality/carbon-based-life-form Neil Patrick Harris lets you, the reader, live his life. You will be born to New Mexico. You will get your big break at an acting camp. You will get into a bizarre confrontation outside a nightclub with actor Scott Caan. Even better, at each critical juncture of your life you will choose how to proceed. You will decide whether to try out for Doogie Howser, M.D. You will decide whether to spend years struggling with your sexuality. You will decide what kind of caviar you want to eat on board Elton John’s yacht.

Choose correctly and you’ll find fame, fortune, and true love. Choose incorrectly and you’ll find misery, heartbreak, and a hideous death by piranhas. All this, plus magic tricks, cocktail recipes, embarrassing pictures from your time as a child actor, and even a closing song. Yes, if you buy one book this year, congratulations on being above the American average, and make that book Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography!

At first I worried that listening to this book rather than reading I would lose out on the awesome 'choose your own adventure' aspect of the autobiography, but in the beginning of the audiobook NPH explains how they've changed things to account for that and just that bit of humor had me sold.

I'm already a NPH fan.  Loved him since the Doogie Days and was a huge fan from the beginning of HIMYM so it was a no-brainer once I started listening to autobiographical audiobooks to pick up this one and I'm so glad I did.  I also feel sorry for any person who read the book instead of listening to NPH read it to them.  You missed out big time.

I loved the stories and I loved the way he told them.  I wanted to be his friend and join in on the 40th birthday celebration.  It was all so very the-best-thing-ever.

I cannot recommend this book enough.  For the Scott Caan story alone.