Could you Make it Up?

'Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies: A Memoir' by Nick Frost (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015)

Hello everyone!  As you may have noticed, I'm a bit of a sucker for a celebrity biography.  My most recent read is 'Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies: A Memoir' by film and TV actor Nick Frost.

(You know, the chap in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy.  And 'Spaced'.  And 'Cuban Fury'.  Simon Pegg's mate.  Oh, for goodness sake, if you're not sure, Google him!  Know who I mean now?  Good, let's proceed...)

Written for his infant son, 'Truths...' is the story of the first 30 years of Frost's life, up until his work on cult sitcom 'Spaced' makes him, Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes) household names.  Born into a working class family in the early 1970s, Frost's childhood is, on the face of it, an ordinary one, full of mischief and optimism.  But no life is without tragedy, and the Frosts suffer at the hands of alcoholism and illness.  In the end, a failed business venture sets them back to square one and the industrious family is left to pick up the pieces.  Restless and hungry for adventure, Frost, now a young adult, volunteers for work on an Israeli kibbutz.  Although a shock to the system at first, he settles into the rag-tag collection of foreigners, working hard but also finding ways to bypass the rules.  When the outside world and the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes itself felt, Frost decides it's time to return to England and, still unsure what he wants to do with his life, falls into restaurant work.  And there he may have contentedly stayed, but for a chance meeting with a random stranger called Simon Pegg.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

There's something almost quaint about this book.  It's full of swearing and drugs, but it's also quite naive and somehow charming.  Frost comes across as an everyman, accessible, directionless and laddish, but ultimately quite harmless.  In fact, he comes across pretty much exactly like the characters he plays!

While 'Truths...' won't be winning any literary prizes, for me the stand out sections described Frost's journey to the kibbutz.  I found them quite evocative and if he ever writes any travel books or presents travel programmes, I'd very happily read / watch them.

Some sections did make me roll my eyes though.  For example, he recounts how he and Pegg discovered an abandoned and apparently haunted building during an adventure in local woods.  It's silly, derivative and out of place and should never have made the final edit.  It was almost as if he lost interest in his narrative and distracted himself by going off on a tangent.

Overall, 'Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies' is a mildly diverting but readable book.  While it's not everyone's cup of tea, as famous peoples' memoirs go, it's not smug and it doesn't name drop as much as it could have done.  I'm glad I read it, but get the feeling that Frost's career is a work in progress, so this is a book that has come too soon.  As it's for his young son rather than me, though, who am I to complain?

Now, what next..?

'Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies' by Nick Frost was published in 2015 by Hodder and Stoughton.