James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of My Life, by James Patterson

  The Stories of My Life is the autobiography of James Patterson, said to be "the most popular storyteller of our time" of which I honestly had not heard before, written in a bunch of very short and out of order chapters, a la Mrs. Bridge, in which he repeats incessantly to outline everything. Very ironic. I liked the character more than the book.

  You see, James Patterson is a type of person that you can't help but admire: he is good at sports, he is good at school, he is good with women, he is good with business and he is a famous writer. And all of this not because anyone handed anything to him, but through hard work and dedication. This guy is the American Dream made flesh.

  He meets famous writers, actors, sports people, business people, several presidents of the United States and so on, he becomes the CEO of the advertising firm he basically interned at and all of this while being nice to people, loving and caring about family and friends and feeling pretty good about himself. And all of this without cocaine!

  So I liked the main character, very inspiring, despite the times having changed so much as to make such a person impossible nowadays, but I can't say I liked the book. The shuffled nature of the stories doesn't really help. It's clear the guy had the outline of the story he wanted to tell, so why write it this way? It didn't improve anything. Is it to clarify that life is a string of scenes and their order and the narrative we tell to ourselves are not that important compared to doing the right thing at the present time? Perhaps. But then it's inevitable that the reader is going to try to unshuffle the scenes into something comprehensible.

  And then is the always present question with an autobiography: how real is all of this? I've read some that sound real and others that feel like the prose version of "Biggest & the Best", by Clawfinger. Are there things in the artificial gaps the author creates between these anecdotes that he doesn't feel like sharing or maybe is not even aware he doesn't? Are the stories in the book overblown to inflate the author's ego? Well, I don't think so. The book actually feels right. Maybe it's not at all accurate - after all that's what a writer's job is, to make things up - but it felt honest.

  What it didn't feel was personal. You see, Patterson is a good writer, he writes with humor and wit, but I didn't feel he was writing about himself, but about this character called Jim Patterson. While honest, it also felt overpolished, the edges smoothed off, and personal is what an autobiography should feel like, something perhaps even more important than being written well.

  Bottom line: really inspiring, felt real, but also impersonal enough to not merit the full mark. I liked it.