Reviews with content warning for Grief - Making It So

I don't normally enjoy memoirs, but I'm a fan of Sir Patrick Stewart, so I had to see what this book was all about. I definitely recommend the audiobook; listening to it in his own voice is a great experience with how good of an actor he is. He does accents, voices, dramatic timing, and so much more.

While I was interested in his stories overall and hadn't heard any of them, being a very casual fan, there were a few that I wasn't quite sure why he included them. They weren't bad, they just felt like non-sequitors in the grand scheme of the book's narrative.

That being said, I appreciated how Patrick Stewart told these stories from his life with humility and respect for those involved. While he did grow up with a certain amount of prejudice, he tells these stories now as someone who has since grown into a very accepting and progressive-minded individual. Of course, there's always the possibility that something is being omitted or falsified, but even if this were a true work of fiction it would still be a good book to me.

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emotional funny informative reflective slow-paced

4.0

Patrick Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940, and has led an acting career on stage and screen that won him a knighthood. He's known to most of us in his role as Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was surprised to learn that Sir Patrick was in a one-man stage show of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.. and narrated an audiobook version for Simon and Schuster.. which is doubly irritating to me as I JUST LISTENED to an audiobook of that, and I didn't know to look for his version. Oh well.

This is the second memoir I have checked out in short succession that tells childhood tales of not having an indoor toilet. Patrick Stewart tells of his childhood trauma, his working class roots and his penchant for train-spotting (what else is there to do in a small town?), and weaves a story of how he got the acting bug. After many lucky breaks, and much hard work, Patrick learns a new accent, embraces the lifestyle of a working actor, and forms a lifelong passion for Shakespeare.

After many crushes on many women he tells of his patchy relationship history. Life with a partner often does not stand up to the rigours of long shooting schedules, and active commitments that span continents... he was a bit of a bounder, which is all well and good to be remorseful of in retrospect, but the accounts he gives are candid and apologetic. Not everyone in his life forgives his transgressions.

As Sir Patrick recalls the layout of one of the places he used to live I am reminded of a house that Dave Grohl talks about in his memoir Storyteller. I was surprised to find that both men talk of spooky hauntings in these houses. I wonder if they are in the same area, or made at around the same time. Just describing the layout of the house gave me a sense memory of having read about it before, so it was extra strange.

This is quite a long book, and quite informative about all sorts of things; If you are not at all into Shakespeare, and English lit like Dickens, it might begin to drag for you. The scope of the narrative shows a change in attitudes toward queer identities and how they are presented in media, right through to how Patrick Stewart chooses to present himself in social media. There is some fanservice of Sir Patrick's short time spent in the company of Vivien Leigh, right through to his work on Star Trek and X-Men. It's been very long career and he doesn't want to quit. I enjoyed the book.

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