The Outside Man

The tell-all celebrity memoir falls victim to a strange paradox. Generally speaking, readers are drawn to such books by the promise of lascivious and decadent stories of life at the top: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and that whole outlandish Hollywood Babylon trip. The problem is that the more legendarily lewd and unruly the given celebrity, the less his or her actual stories tend to impress. Few would be surprised to discover when reading The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, the collaborative memoir of the glam-rock dirt bags in Mötley Crüe, that they inhaled an exorbitant quantity of drugs, or that while on tour Ozzy Osbourne, the perpetually rattled heavy metal icon, once snorted a line of ants. This is precisely what we expect of such cartoonish bad boys, after all. Their antics are so storied, looming so large in the pop cultural imagination, that the actual facts cannot help but disappoint. A line of ants? That’s...