He was also in things called "plays"

Lithgow, John. Drama: An Actor's Education. New York: Harper, 2011.

I don't read many celebrity memoirs (I think the last was Rob Lowe's), so it's always a little hard for me to gauge if one is good. What sort of lasting value should a such a book have? Should I feel compelled to reread it? Is learning something necessary? What about just enjoying the ride?

John Lithgow's new memoir succeeds on at least the second and third parts. It's a quick read and full of enough interesting glimpses into worlds I'll probably never join (Harvard, London in the 60s, the New York theater scene) that it kept my attention quite well. (Writing that sentence made me wonder how I would react if transplanted into one of those environments, unmoored like the characters in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Too much Lithgow this week?)

Four things make this book worth the time I spent on it:

• Lithgow offers the useful insight (from his nude-drawing teacher, of all people) that facility in some area can be both a great asset and a great drawback, allowing him "to get by with glib, hasty, lazy work." He observes that "[t]hings came easy for me, so too often [he] was perfectly willing to skip over difficult tasks." Ouch. It's a good reminder for me, and maybe others.
• He has another insight later, when a bad professional choice took his personal life on a wonderful path that he would have missed completely otherwise. This is good to remember when we feel like we're making mistakes.
• He got me quite interested in the book Tellers of Tales, which he loved as a child and which basically brought his ailing father back to life. If I can ever find a copy for (significantly) less than $75, I'm buying it.
• He used one of the best materials-engineering-related metaphors I've seen in a long time, when referring to the effects of his infidelity: "Each time, my marriage would lose a little more tensile strength."

So maybe he drops too many names (or doesn't till the end of a breathlessly recounted story, then shocks us with the fact that it was MERYL STREEP or someone), and maybe he wastes a lot of time changing the names of people he doesn't want to insult (when it takes about 14 seconds on IMDB to figure out who they are), but I'm okay with that. I get the feeling that he, rather than a ghostwriter, wrote the book, and that's almost good enough for me. He tried, and he revealed a lot, and I'm not sad I read it.

Rating: **1/2