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A review by novelinsights
Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent by Anthony Rapp
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
I fell in love with the Rent movie in middle/high school. It was an obsession, to the point where my friend group and I were trying to organize the filming of our own edition of the movie (never got off the ground, but we spent a lot of time planning out how it would have happened, so much so that my best friend at the time, who'd planned on playing the Maureen to my Joanne, still calls me Pookie over a decade later). Anyway, I just wanted you to understand how big a part of my life Rent was back then. As an adult, I still consider it my favorite musical and one of my favorite movies in general, but I don't think about it all the time the way I did, so when I finally picked up this novel in the weeks leading up to my 30th birthday, I really hoped that I hadn't waited too long to get the full experience. I didn't wait too long.
Reading this brought me right back into the vividness with which I'd always loved Rent, and it gave me a greater appreciation of the actor who plays one of my favorite characters. I hadn't realized how involved he'd been in the musical from the very beginning, or how many different iterations of it he'd done. As with all books, fiction and non-fiction, I'd also been interested to pick up some stray facts about random other things I'd never heard of before, like the I-57 murders.
Like most (if not all) memoirs, this is written in a loosely narrative style, which is my preference as a primarily fiction reader, myself. It painted a picture of grief and love and sometimes rage that helped me get a better sense of who Anthony Rapp is aside from the dorky, quiet filmmaker we're all familiar with him playing. I definitely recommend this for all fans of Rapp, and Rent in general.
Reading this brought me right back into the vividness with which I'd always loved Rent, and it gave me a greater appreciation of the actor who plays one of my favorite characters. I hadn't realized how involved he'd been in the musical from the very beginning, or how many different iterations of it he'd done. As with all books, fiction and non-fiction, I'd also been interested to pick up some stray facts about random other things I'd never heard of before, like the I-57 murders.
Like most (if not all) memoirs, this is written in a loosely narrative style, which is my preference as a primarily fiction reader, myself. It painted a picture of grief and love and sometimes rage that helped me get a better sense of who Anthony Rapp is aside from the dorky, quiet filmmaker we're all familiar with him playing. I definitely recommend this for all fans of Rapp, and Rent in general.