Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies by Nick Frost: Book #46 for 2020
Nick Frost is an actor most well known for his acting role on Spaced and his film collaborations with Simon Pegg, so I was very excited to read his autobiography.
Surprisingly, and unlike a lot of celebrity autobigraphies I have read, this one focused mostly on his life before he became a TV and film star, and I noticed there was a long chapter about his family life. I also noticed that his family life was far from cheeful, because of the amount of tragedy that he had faced in his life, with the loss of several family members, including his mother. I noticed also that he talked a lot about drugs, which it seems he took frequently. This was followed by a chapter about his time spent living and working in Israel, which included stories about him stealing food from the kibbutz where he was based.
Simon Pegg was hardly mentioned until about half way into the book, but I wasn't surprised when he was mentioned a lot; Spaced, and its stars, including Pegg's co-writer Jessica Hynes (then known as Jessica Stevenson) wasn't mentioned until very late in the book.
I enjoyed this book a lot; I loved the way that Nick Frost seemed able to get a laugh from anything, however bleak; the book was full of moments where he talked about far from cheerful situations, including being attacked in the street, even bereavements, and followed it up with some gallows humour. It was good to know that he wrote the whole thing himself, though given the title, I did wonder if I should take any of it with a pinch of salt (one epic moment of revenge turned out to be a fantasy sequence). The only real issue I had was that the narrative repeatedly switched between the past and present tenses, often in the same sentence, and I wasn't sure if that was deliberate or not.
The book hinted that Nick Frost would write a second autobiography, and I would definitely read it if he did.