Tragic Sandwich

Tag: Rob Lowe

  • The Lowe Down: One More Celebrity Memoir

    So I’ve finished Rob Lowe’s Stories I Only Tell My Friends, and for the most part I liked it.

    I’ve never been a huge Rob Lowe fan–I’ve liked his more recent work on The West Wing and Parks & Recreation, but one of the things that struck me as I read this book was how many movies he’s made–and how few of them I’ve seen.

    Lowe has some funny celebrity stories (is there such a thing as a bad Christoper Walken story?), and his encounter with John Belushi, while brief, seems incredibly sad. The real strength of the book, as far as I was concerned, was two-fold. First, his years growing up in Malibu seem to have given him incredible insight into how privilege and a lack of consequences can lead to truly disastrous outcomes for teens. Second, he really conveyed his lifelong drive to act.

    Toward the end, though, the book lost power. I think he knew that there were two things he had to deal with: the sex scandal, and his decision to leave The West Wing. But it really felt like he was reluctant to really open up about either. I didn’t have the sense that he was trying to put himself in an unrealistically good light–more that these are things that are still painful to him. And I can get that, but it’s kind of the point of writing a memoir.

    Since I read this on the heels of Melissa Gilbert’s Prairie Tale, it was also interesting to contrast how the two of them talked about their relationship. For Melissa Gilbert, it was clearly one of the defining romances of her life. For Rob Lowe? He barely mentions her name. I get the sense that his approach to talking about his personal life–which is actually quite gentlemanly–is driven by his respect for his wife. But I did kind of feel bad for Melissa Gilbert when I read Lowe’s book.

    But it was definitely worth a read. Lowe’s journey to sobriety seems to have led to self-awareness that is less self-absorbed than I had expected. I don’t think you can be Rob Lowe and truly be humble and self-effacing, but he’s clearly aware that there is a real world, and that there are real problems.

    And it was a whole lot better than Melissa Anderson‘s book.

  • Little House in the Big Bookstore

    So I’ve gone through a spate of celebrity memoirs lately, which is interesting–because I pretty much never read celebrity memoirs. This binge, though, had a theme.

    Growing up, I was a huge Little House on the Prairie fan. I’d read all the books (at least, through The First Four Years), and I adored the show, even though it deviated from the books before it even started–when tiny Melissa Gilbert announced to the camera that the show would be set in Walnut Grove, even if that was from On the Banks of Plum Creek.

    Then, in college, I wound up with a set of friends who developed a ritual of watching syndicated episodes of Bonanza, Little House, and CHiPs (I guess we needed a break from TV westerns at that point in the day). We were all struck by how our perception of Melissa Sue Anderson’s Mary Ingalls had changed; while we remembered her as a bland goody-two-shoes, she was much more wry than we had noticed as children. And she was much more likely to punch Nellie Oleson in the face.

    Recently I became interested in Alison Arngrim’s Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated. It’s an incredible story, and parts of it are very hard to read, but Arngrim is a lively writer who earns your sympathy–and is, as far as I can tell, much more likeable than Nellie could ever have imagined anyone to be.

    Next up: Melissa Anderson’s The Way I See It: A Look Back on My Life on Little House. This one lived down to its Amazon reviews. Anderson was never close to her co-stars; Arngrim clearly found her standoffish to the extreme. And this book is incredibly unrevealing. Between the title and the lack of information (a significant chunk of the book consists of episode summaries), I can only assume that Anderson felt like she had to write it. It doesn’t even have the personality she showed as Mary. The most interesting thing? The episode summaries are in narrative form, and incidents from Anderson’s actual life are written like a script.

    Finally, I read Melissa Gilbert’s Prairie Tale. It wasn’t as strong as Arngrim’s, but Gilbert does seem to have a fair amount of self-knowledge, so it was an interesting read.

    So what am I reading now that I’ve finished Melissa Gilbert’s memoirs? Why, Rob Lowe‘s, naturally.