Monday, October 20, 2014

Not My Father's Son: A Memoir, by Alan Cumming


Basically the only decent picture I could get of the book. Via .

Genre: Memoir
Rating: 
Published: 2014
Publisher: It Books
Pages: 288

Many like my age (I'm sure), the first time I saw Alan Cumming on the big screen (or any screen, tbh), It Was the first Spy Kids  movie. He played the villian-turn-good guy (spoilers?), Floop, a reclusive toymaker / TV star who lived in a crazy, Gaudi-esque mansion on a remote island. Was he weird? Yes. Was he sympathetic? Oh, totally. Have I seen anything else he's been in since That? No, not really.  (Just kidding. I saw him in the Emma movie too.) 

This past spring, It Books reached out to book bloggers interested in reading and reviewing Cumming's memoir, Not My Father's Son. Interested in learning more about Cumming, I kind of blindly requested a copy. I would say that I'm generally pretty clueless about celebrities' personal lives, and haven't really read celebrity memoirs / autobiographies before (The sole exception being Is Everyone Hanging Out ​​Without Me?  by Mindy Kaling).   I kind of forgot about it, actually, until one day when I got a copy in the mail! (Surprise packages are AWESOME, and doubly so when they're books.)

In Not My Father's Son, Alan Cumming discusses and details the years of abuse he endured at the hands of his father, spanning from his childhood and lasting into his adult life. As Cumming grows up and begins to question his father as well as the reasons for his father's abuse, Cumming also starts to differentiate himself from his father's person and develops an interest in acting.

Cumming's voice caries through the narrative easily, and I was almost surprised at how quickly I fell into the pages of this book. Cumming gives, I think, a very full and detailed account of his childhood as well as more recent events pertaining to the taping of "his" episode on the show Who Do You Think You Are? Because I found Cumming's tone to be conversational, I wasn't entirely surprised when he would digress from the subject at hand (his father, his identity, etc.) in order to talk about his hair, Eurovision, and his fear of losing his Masterpiece! job at PBS to Patti Smith. 

I found Not My Father's Son to be a very engaging book. Cumming's style is at times self-depreciating, but is also very raw and open. He is very open about his life, and rarely (if ever) shies away from "uncomfortable" subjects. I would personally recommend this book depending on whether or not you have an interest in "celebrity" books or are interested in learning more about Alan Cumming. Not My Father's Son has piqued my interest in reading more "celebrity" books and memoirs. By the end of the book, I found myself with a new appreciation for his work. I look forward to his next project(s).

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