Will: The Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography
Will Smith needs little introduction, but this autobiography might just reintroduce him entirely. Written with Mark Manson (author of the multi-million-copy hit The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck), this is a memoir that earns its bestseller status through sheer honesty rather than celebrity gloss. Smith's journey from an anxious boy in a fraught West Philadelphia household to rap phenomenon to one of Hollywood's most bankable actors is, on its own, a genuinely extraordinary story. Box office records, global fame, a family that mirrored his own stardom back at him. By any visible measure, he had won. But that's only the surface of it. The sharper, more surprising half of the book is where things get uncomfortable. His family, it turns out, experienced his relentless drive not as inspiration but as a kind of captivity, unwilling cast members in a production they'd never agreed to join. That reckoning is where Will becomes something more than a celebrity memoir. What makes it work is the writing. It's candid without feeling calculated, reflective without turning preachy. Smith examines what ambition actually costs, and what sheer willpower, for all its force, is incapable of buying you. There's real wit here too, alongside the darker passages, and the pacing rarely lets up. Praise has come from all directions, with Oprah Winfrey calling it the finest memoir she's read and the Telegraph rather deliciously noting its 'indiscretions, drug-fuelled escapades and terrible parenting.' Both verdicts, somehow, are accurate. Few readers will share Smith's particular pressures, but the emotional logic of his story, the idea that the drive carrying you upward may need rethinking before it carries you somewhere worse, is recognisable to most. Enormously entertaining, and more quietly wise than you might expect.
- Author: Mark Smith, Will,Manson
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Film & Cinema
- ISBN: 978-1529158281
- Pages: 432 pages