Nerd Do Well

Nerd Do Well
by
Simon Pegg
read by
Simon Pegg

I don't much go in for autobiographies. Well except for anything by Frank McCourt. Or "Bossypants" by Tina Fey. Or the Bill Clinton book. Okay, so maybe I do go in for autobiographies, but they're a small proportion of what I read or listen to. Okay, I admit that I liked the Hillary Clinton book, too, the one where she reads it. I guess Sarah Vowell's books are as much autobiographical as they are historical. Okay, maybe I am a fan of memoirs, at least by savvy sophisticated authors; I liked John Stewart's book too.
I've been a long-time fan of Simon Pegg, so even if I wasn't a fan of this form, there is a good chance that I would have checked it out, especially knowing that he was reading his own book. I heard interviews with Pegg on NPR when this book first came out and expected I was going to mostly hear about first breaking into television and how much he hated the new Star Wars movies, and probably a couple of silly jokes along the way. Well, I did get all of that, but in less depth than I was expecting, but the trade-off was that he told a lot more about himself than just those brief moments. In actuality, this book was much like Fey's "Bossypants", both in scope and in voice. From the outset, Pegg makes it clear he's not going too deep into his personal life, nor is his goal to talk ill about anyone else he's met along his path. He remained true to his word. There are two notable differences from the format that Fey took,though, one brilliant, one not so much. The first and brilliant difference is the story of Simon Pegg superspy and his android "man" servant in their efforts to save the world from annihilation. Very funny. If this was a movie - a James Bondesque spoof type film, I would so be all over watching it - especially if Pegg wrote and starred in it. The other, not-so-brilliant difference, is that Pegg doesn't share any of the non-positive times of his life. I don't know what kind of hardships the man has gone through, one could hope that they were few and far between, but other than mentioning that it took him a while to get how the whole stand-up comedy thing worked, we get nothing. From a writer as talented as Pegg, I expect that he could make any incident either touching or funny (or both). It would have been nice to hear a little more on the years it took him to break into the business. What was he doing while he was waiting for his various breaks? He mentions being lucky to get some or most of his opportunities, and luck implies that what he was doing wouldn't have gotten him the success he now enjoys without some type of intervention. I think the success would be more appreciated by us fans if we understood better how it was deserved. Now, I'm not saying that I want to hear how the man was down-and-out, addicted to smack, ready to kill a junky for his next fix - I have no reason to believe he lead that kind of life at all, I just want to know how he dealt with rejection of scripts or how it took him years on the comedy circuit to get noticed, that kind of thing.
I guess the short-comings of the book really set me up to get his next book where he promises to fill us in on what we missed out on in this book. When, that comes, I will eagerly await the audiobook, hopefully read by Pegg and to hear the further adventures of Pegg and his android "man" servant.