More Fool Me: A Memoir

Comedian Stephen Fry's personality has always been his greatest asset. Starting with his early career at Cambridge (alongside other future stars Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie), he's managed to create a persona that is both somehow unabashedly blunt and delicate, deeply intelligent but overly modest. This delightful mixture has gained him a worldwide following (especially on Twitter, where he is much-loved), and is the selling point of his third memoir, More Fool Me.

While his first two forays at autobiography covered his childhood and time at college, More Fool Me follows Fry just as he's made it big, a published novelist and TV star in Britain while still a young man. The first half of the book lays out how he got that far (briefly recapping his previous memoirs, Moab Is My Washpot and The Fry Chronicles) and the back half is a collection of entries from his diary in 1993. Fry attempts to provide an overarching theme to his life in the early '90s, but aside from a heartfelt diatribe against the use of cocaine, the connections between what he chooses to relate feel thin. This leads to a rather disjointed narrative, but readers won't be picking up More Fool Me for its adherence to a particular form. The only unifying theme is the fact that these events happened to Fry, but that's more than enough reason to devour the book. One gets the sense that he could make any story from his life interesting. --Noah Cruickshank, marketing manager, Open Books, Chicago, Ill.

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