This exceptionally written book starts with Lowe's childhood in Ohio and his parent's marriage breaking up when he is but five-years-old leaving him and his brother Chad only seeing their father every other weekend. His mother will go on to marry another man, Bill with whom she will have a son Micah. He would act in local theater productions and college shows and be treated as a freak for wanting to be an actor. When he's thirteen his mother would divorce Bill and uproot them and move them to Point Dume just outside of Malibu (but not the glamorous Malibu of today) where a surprise awaits them. The doctor she was seeing at the allergy clinic she went to when she was sick is there and they're going to get married. His once fierce mother would develop a habit of spending her days writing things not meant to be read or being sick in bed with something that could not be defined.
He still gets crap for wanting to be an actor in Malibu a place where the cool kids want to be surfers. He starts to go on auditions for stuff but doesn't get callbacks. Until finally he gets a gig as an Extra in a Coke commercial. It pays $2,500. He frames the check. Now, this is when he starts to name drop. He meets up with the Sheen brothers Emilio and Charlie and the Penn brothers Sean and Chris who make movies and he will eventually get asked to be in the Sheen brother home movies. Or going out with Jennifer Grant, daughter of Dyan Cannon and Cary Grant and meeting her famous father, but not really knowing who he was. Or meeting John Dykstra the special effects coordinator for Star Wars whom his aunt and uncle worked for and getting to see a rough cut of the movie and the special effects set before the movie comes out.
He gets a role on an ABC TV show in 1979 called A New Kind of Family that would last maybe twelve episodes but would give him some popularity and introduces him to Janet Jackson his co-star. ABC love him enough to put a hold on him for another series but that falls through and instead, they use him for Afterschool Specials. His first is the one about the teenage dad.
This will lead him to get his foot in the door to an audition to a movie being made by Francis Ford Coppola called The Outsiders based on the book by S.E. Hinton. He's auditioning for one of the coveted roles of the brothers, Sodapop Curtis. The scene is one where the brothers are together and he tells them how he feels and cries. He's not sure he can cry on cue, but he does and nails the audition and gets to go to New York City to compete for the role there. He's going up against Tom Cruise and others. He and Tom have become friends since Tom, Tommy Howell and Emilio are all going up for parts and all hang out together. When Tom tanks the audition for Sodapop and he nails it he gets the role. Unfortunately, most of his role will end up on the cutting room floor, though if you want to watch the whole thing with the deleted scenes watch the DVD The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. He spends a great deal of time in this section describing his time making this movie and it's fascinating to read.
He'll go on to name drop many times and continue on with his movie career and how he got The West Wing and what went wrong there and his alcohol abuse problems and how he sought help for that and meeting the woman, Sheryl, who would change his life forever giving him two sons and a family to keep him grounded. He even goes a little bit into his political activism, but not too much. I wasn't surprised to find that he has rewritten scripts as this book is so beautifully written and with such skill. You do get a real sense of who he is in as much as he lets you in which is pretty far but not so far you feel as though its too much information. This is an excellent book and I give it five out of five stars.
Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Only-Tell-Friends-Autobiography-ebook/dp/B004OA62VS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551108457&sr=8-1&keywords=stories+i+only+tell+my+friends+by+rob+lowe
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