Through living and working in certain neighborhoods of Toronto, I’ve met quite a number of celebrities. Despite being taught by my parents that famous people should be treated the same as everyone else, over the years I have developed the guilty pleasure of reading celebrity autobiographies. I can usually tell who dictated their memoirs to a ghost writer, with so many missing details that the author had to use media archives to fill in the gaps, and the rare few who actually wrote the book themselves.
Actor Rob Lowe falls into the latter category. His latest book, “Love Life”, really gives the reader a glimpse of who Rob Lowe the real person is–not just a talented actor, but a devoted husband and father, as well as an eloquent author.
I’ve been a fan of Rob Lowe’s acting for what feels like forever. I remember faithfully watching “A New Kind of Family” as a little girl, right up until it got cancelled. We didn’t have cable TV and it was one of the few American TV shows that the CBC broadcast so it always stuck in my mind.I continued watching his movies and TV shows over the years but I never really knew anything about Rob Lowe except from reading cheesy articles in Tiger Beat magazines and the scandals that I heard about on the news. The movie “Youngblood” was filmed near our home but hanging around the set for a glimpse of the stars would have been a definite no-no in our household.
“Love Life” is the best book I’ve read so far this year and possibly my favourite celebrity-penned book of all time. I did not expect it to be better than his first book, “Stories I Only Tell My Friends”. I cried through most of the book, from laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face (eg. Rob Lowe as Bigfoot, David Spade saying that he weighs 285 pounds) but also crying emotional tears as his words on the page touched me so deeply. “A Boy” was a particularly difficult chapter for me to read. I used up a lot of tissues reading about Rob Lowe’s eldest son Matthew preparing to go to college. There was so much fatherly love and pride in those pages. Maybe I’ve gone soft since becoming a parent myself but I’m choking up again thinking about it. Rob Lowe and his wife have done a great job sheltering their boys from paparazzi and allowing them to lead normal lives away from the spotlight.
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