Paul Dobson's Reviews > Memoirs and Misinformation

So remember when you were in high school and took that creative writing class? Then you had a great idea to write a story. You’d put in all your friends and all other people in your world. You’d make it an over-the-top diatribe and include some of the worldly wisdom you’d picked up during your time on the planet. Remember that? Well so does Jim Carrey. He did that, only with a wider vocabulary and tenured form.

This book drips with pathos. The grandiose rants delivered through stream-of-consciousness made this reader raise an eyebrow more than once. The thoughts presented are understandable, just not exactly palatable. For instance he writes, “Her debutante’s scream was the final cry of a certain kind of humanity, declaring the world as they’d known it a lost civilization.” Words like this need a build up and complete atmosphere to make an impact. This is just how this book is written - every page just contains a certain average of these phrases as the story plods on.

The famous characters portrayed here seem to be mostly wild, outlandish versions of themselves. True, you could say it’s art imitating life, but this is art on methamphetamines. At the beginning of the novel, I was thinking this might be Hunter S. Thompson-esque, but I was mistaken. Kelsey Grammer is written as Frasier. To me, that just doesn’t work.

I could go on, but I feel my point has been delivered. I will give Carrey this though - he really made me think about what possible type of literature this might be and what it means to be ‘good’ literature.