Last week I finished Russell Brand’s “My Booky Wook” (as you can tell from its appearance in my bathtub):
All I knew about Russell Brand before Booky Wook was what I’d seen of his late night appearances with the likes of Leno & Letterman. And, natch, his interview with Terri Gross on Fresh Air. On all these occasions he was just the loveliest, funniest most disarming fellow one could ever hope to encounter. Quick-witted and eloquent. Funny without sharp edges. Lover of ladies of all sorts. And so I thought sitting down with his book would be a lot like listening to one of those interviews – just without commercials or stupid pet tricks.
And in some ways that’s what it was like – his voice is pretty unmistakable.
But. There was an awful lot of the unexpected for me too.
Much of his life has been a mess. And not just a scruffy, endearing sort of mess. But a wrist-cutting, perversion-laden, drug-sodden mess. I think it wouldn’t be unfair to say that much of the content was actually repellant to me: depressing and disgusting and completely foreign. But I read it cover to cover for that one attraction: his voice.
For all the distance that the details of his life created, his story-telling drew me in. I just read something from Donald Miller the other day that talked about how hard it is not to crowd writing with too much of yourself. Even if (especially if) you’re writing about yourself…there’s so much temptation to self defend or self promote. I’ve just read Reading Lolita in Tehran this summer too, and I thought it was an utter failure on this front – whereas Booky Wook was absolutely brilliant about it.
How do you tell stories that are so extreme in their nature and neither be too proud nor too ashamed? How do you learn some tremendous lessons in the living of your life, but not get all preachy in the retelling of that life? Well, watch Russell Brand. He’ll say something like, “Here’s what happened (as best as I can recall), and though I might not do that thing now, I sure did do it then.” (Of course his version includes a lot more “blokes” and “birds” and Brit-culture references.)
In one part he recounts an interlude with a prostitute where he smashes her phone because she keeps answering it while he’s trying to get his money’s worth: “And she looks at me again, suddenly mortified, and the scene becomes real and awful, and she just starts crying. And now we’re two human beings in a room on earth. Our previous roles, a prostitute and a customer…that’s all gone now; the shards of that illusion lie shattered amid the pieces of her phone. We’re just people, one of whom has behaved atrociously to the other” (273). He seems to do this over and over again – here’s the story I was telling myself, but here’s what was real, so do with that what you will cheeky reader. So, no matter how foreign the setting you come to that moment of we’re just people he and I. And there’s something lovely and healthy and free about that space.
So here’s my conclusion: if you want content that will elevate you, make you smarter about world affairs and maybe a little bit of literature – get Reading Lolita in Tehran. But, if you want to experience good writing – story-telling that might actually invite you to tackle your own truth – get Russell Brand.
