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4.34 AVERAGE
4.34 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
A really interesting and moving autobiography, not the usual celebrity biography shite that’s churned out. I raised an occasional eyebrow at his pretentiousness and the cynicism is incessant, but his reasons are clear and by the end you understand the man well. A worthwhile read.
I am in love with this book. I have lost a parent. Lost people to dementia and death. This book covers that so beautifully without telling you how to feel about your own experiences. It also gives great perspective to so many things.
Also if you can do the audiobook i highly encourage it. It gave another level of depth.
Also if you can do the audiobook i highly encourage it. It gave another level of depth.
emotional
funny
informative
Christopher Eccleston’s memoir is a force to be reckoned with. It is a painful yet touching account of many things: masculinity, anorexia, dementia, and the relationship between fathers and sons. Eccleston’s work is accessible and honest, which is what makes it such a heartfelt read.
Te amo, Chris. Ese es el nivel de objetividad de esta pequeña review.
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
I honestly listened to this because Eccleston does the audiobook narration, and I wanted something low stress and pleasant to listen to. I was also hoping for Doctor Who gossip, which he did not provide, especially. The book wasn't very organised and didn't really have a strong through-line or theme (how dare you not have a theme, random person's life!), so it was more scattered thoughts about mental health, class in the UK and working in the film and television industry, and the intersection of the above. If you want to listen to someone with a nice northern accent ramble on for however many hours, I'd recommend this.
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3323033.html
This was the last book I finished in 2019, and the best of the Doctor Who biographies and autobiographies that I read last year (the others were by or about John Leeson, Mary Tamm (v1, v2), Robert Holmes, Matthew Waterhouse, Peter Davison and Andrew Cartmel). There's actually not all that much in it about Eccleston's performance as the Ninth Doctor. He devotes a short chapter to it, praising Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffatt, Euros Lyn and Billie Piper, and I guess letting his silence speak for the rest. He bookends that chapter with the experience of watching his own stories with his own young children, fifteen years on, which I found a very effective device to tell what the show now means to him. I'm looking forward to seeing him at Gallfrey One next month.
The guts of the book are about Eccleston's own somewhat tortured soul, and its roots in the life experience of his father, a factory worker whose talents were suffocated by the class-ridden social structures of mid-twentieth century Salford. He goes into moving detail about his own experiences of mental illness and particularly anorexia; it's tough but fascinating to read. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures and successes as an actor; always of course in the context of a profession which is rigged in favour of thin people with posh accents - he forced himself to become thin but could never be posh. Another moving passage describes his relationship with Trevor Hicks, who he portrayed in Hillsborough; the two became friends to the point that Eccleston was Hicks' best man at his wedding. But the most gut-wrenching sections are the passages about his father's gradual descent into dementia, and the consequent slow death of normal family life. The timing of the various incidents is a bit confusing - few dates are given, and we jump around quite a lot in the thirty years of his career; but reading between the lines it looks like his father's sharpest decline coincided with the 2004-05 filming of Doctor Who.
This is not a fluffy book, but it's a very thoughtful one, angry in places and always passionate.
This was the last book I finished in 2019, and the best of the Doctor Who biographies and autobiographies that I read last year (the others were by or about John Leeson, Mary Tamm (v1, v2), Robert Holmes, Matthew Waterhouse, Peter Davison and Andrew Cartmel). There's actually not all that much in it about Eccleston's performance as the Ninth Doctor. He devotes a short chapter to it, praising Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffatt, Euros Lyn and Billie Piper, and I guess letting his silence speak for the rest. He bookends that chapter with the experience of watching his own stories with his own young children, fifteen years on, which I found a very effective device to tell what the show now means to him. I'm looking forward to seeing him at Gallfrey One next month.
The guts of the book are about Eccleston's own somewhat tortured soul, and its roots in the life experience of his father, a factory worker whose talents were suffocated by the class-ridden social structures of mid-twentieth century Salford. He goes into moving detail about his own experiences of mental illness and particularly anorexia; it's tough but fascinating to read. He is disarmingly frank about his own failures and successes as an actor; always of course in the context of a profession which is rigged in favour of thin people with posh accents - he forced himself to become thin but could never be posh. Another moving passage describes his relationship with Trevor Hicks, who he portrayed in Hillsborough; the two became friends to the point that Eccleston was Hicks' best man at his wedding. But the most gut-wrenching sections are the passages about his father's gradual descent into dementia, and the consequent slow death of normal family life. The timing of the various incidents is a bit confusing - few dates are given, and we jump around quite a lot in the thirty years of his career; but reading between the lines it looks like his father's sharpest decline coincided with the 2004-05 filming of Doctor Who.
This is not a fluffy book, but it's a very thoughtful one, angry in places and always passionate.