Stories I Only Tell My Friends- Rob Lowe

First, full disclosure: I love Rob Lowe. I think if I was born a little bit earlier I would love him even more, not having seen the movies he is most famous for until later in my life. Sam Seaborn, Chris Traeger, these are just two of the characters that Rob Lowe has played in my lifetime that I love. Essentially, if it was shown in his writing (I assume it’s him, but am skeptical despite not seeing any credit to a ghostwriter) that he was even a fraction like these men, I was going to be happy with his book.

As Rob takes us through his life, in an order that was mostly chronological but with the occasional tangent, the first thing that really hit me was the sheer amount of stars he happened to know or just run into as a kid. The coincidences are unreal. In one chapter he meets and stars in amateur movies with a young Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen, then later meets LeVar Burton literally a week before he hit it big in Roots. Somehow he has a connection to the people who did the Star Wars special effects and saw the Death Star before the movie came out. He meets Jim Henson and Frank Oz from the muppet show. Frankly, it’s fascinating, if slightly unbelievable. I mean it makes sense, he was living in Malibu and trying to get into the business, but it just seems bizarre that he manages to run into so many celebrities before they were big.

Regardless, the look at Rob’s life was absorbing. I read this book in about four days, and found myself even more interested in his life than I had expected. I think my only disappointment was that he didn’t talk about The West Wing, or his more recent projects more. I know that most of his fans are more interested in his 80s, pre-sober life, but I would have liked to see more about working with the other actors that I recognized (Allison Janney, Martin Sheen, Bradley Whitford, etc) and the other things that I know him for. He touched briefly on his relationship with Aaron Sorkin and why he finally left the show, but in general glosses over all of the sketchy subjects of his life (being known as difficult, leaving The West Wing because of money, the backlash from his sex tape, his struggles with alcoholism). I think it would have been more realistic if he had focused on these things just a little bit more. The tough stuff that he did touch on rang a little bit false to me, and every once in awhile I caught myself thinking he was a bit pompous.

However, I still very much enjoyed the look at Rob Lowe’s life, and he is certainly still one of my favorites. This is another solid 3, not something I need to read again, but I’m glad I picked it up.