I have always preferred autobiographies to biographies, because biographies almost always end with the death of the main character.

More seriously: one always has to be a bit careful with an autobiography, because the motives of the author, who is also the subject, must be suspect until proven otherwise.

In the end, I don't know whether Sir Elton is completely honest in his book or not. He certainly seems to be, at least, attempting the feat. He has a no-holds-barred approach to discussion situations where he acted like an asshole, in one particular case over a period of years; he puts all blame for the failure of his marriage to Renate Blauel firmly upon himself; and he is not at all shy about admitting that he has inherited a raging bad temper from both of his parents.

This is not in any way a tell-all sort of book. He describes most of the people he has known (Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth II, Princess Diana...) in very positive terms, and, when he describes someone more negatively (for example, his encounter with Elvis Presley), he talks not only about what that person has become, but why: Elvis had been isolated from reality, and from most of the consequences of his actions for so long, that he was pretty much dissociated by the time Elton met him (not long before he died).

On the other hand, there are people (including his parents) on whom he has no problem ladling massive amounts of blame. If the facts are as he describes them - and in a few cases, such as the manager who ripped him off, they are verifiable (though I have not chosen to do the work) - then these people certainly deserve to have blame poured on their heads.

Perhaps the most moving section of the book is his spiral into alcohol-drugs-bulemia, and his eventual, difficult, decision to enter a recovery center. (It was, incidentally, difficult to find one who could deal with someone with drug, alcohol, and eating disorders.) Coming out the other side, and spending a long time attending AA meetings -- sometimes more than one per day -- created a side of his life that had not previously existed, and that, eventually, made it possible for him to marry David Furnish and for them to have two sons together.

I come away thinking that Me is a genuine warts-and-all autobiography.

But can I ever know?

77 out of 88 piano keys

I can remember, not too long ago, a time when this book would have been considered pornographic. In 2025, it won the Man Booker Prize.

It tells the life story, more or less, of István. We meet him as a boy living in a small city in Hungary. In the first chapter, he fails to have sex with a girl his own age, and is then gradually seduced by an older woman who lives across the landing from István and his mother: the relationship ends in the accidental death of the woman's husband and István's spending ten years in jail.

He gets out, spends a short time helping smuggle drugs from Croatia, and eventually ends up in the army in Kuwait, where he accidentally becomes something of a hero. And so on.

It's very incidental, less "cause and effect" driven than "this happened, then this happened," with, at times, very little seeming to connecit one "this" to the next.

Yet somehow it all seems to hold itself together, rather like an early Vonnegut novel, only the humor is much drier and the sex more frequent and explicit.

My book club picked this to read, and I cannot honestly understand why except for that Man Booker prize.

Oh well.

Five out of ten classic watches.