BOOK REVIEW: Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Shane | 20 November 2015 | Reply

BOOK REVIEW: Truths, Half Truths & Little White Lies by Nick Frost

Hatchette Australia
October 2015
Paperback, $32.99
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar

Entertainment Biography

8/10

The temptation with comic actor Nick Frost’s memoir is to pick it up expecting behind the scenes tales about the making of Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, Paul and the other films he and best mate/sometimes-creative partner Simon Pegg have made, but TRUTHS… is not that book.

This, instead, is the story of a dysfunctional childhood, a boy-man with an appetite for drugs and booze and a dangerously absent lack of any real life direction, and how he stumbled from one dead end to another for the first thirty years of his life.

The reader needs to be prepared for all the sort of debauched thrills and spills that a hunger for mind-numbing intoxication can serve up, including a couple of life-scares, many many many bad decisions, the odd destructive relationship, and a fair bit of anti-social behaviour. There’s also a fair few laughs in there, as Frost tells his story very self-deprecatingly and is well aware of the absurdity of his history and demons.

It is, without a doubt, a sobering tale of someone who literally felt that he had no future, who, like far too many people around the world, stumble on every day somehow making ends meet with little or no prospects for anything to improve.

It’s also a story of friendships, of how they can weather stupid irresponsible behaviour, and how meeting up with the right person can absolutely change your life. Meeting Simon Pegg when he was a semi-popular stand-up comedian led Frost down a myriad of avenues he would never otherwise have explored, culminating (for the purpose of this memoir) in a supporting role in Pegg’s TV comedy Spaced. Heartwarming stuff.

For the rest – Frost & Pegg’s movie career and more – we will have to wait for another volume. For now, TRUTHS… is an amusing and enlightening tale of how Frost became the man he is today.