This memoir by the late novelist and screenwriter Sidney Sheldon has a great opening: “At the age of seventeen, working as a delivery boy at Afremow’s drugstore in Chicago was the perfect job, because it made it possible for me to steal enough sleeping pills to commit suicide.” Knowing that Sheldon had a long, successful career, you can’t help but wonder how he got from the point of wanting to commit suicide as a teenager to winning an Academy Award, creating several highly successful TV series, and writing eighteen novels that have sold over 300 million copies so far.
I’ve read maybe half of those novels and enjoyed all of them. I’ll probably read the others eventually, because Sheldon, while not a great stylist, was an excellent storyteller, a master at making the reader want to find out what was going to happen next. The same thing is true of this memoir, which is written in a quasi-novelistic style with lots of dialogue, no doubt recreated from memory by Sheldon. How accurate it is is anybody’s guess, but it’s entertaining, that’s for sure. Sheldon writes at length about the battles with depression that plagued him all through his life, and he doesn’t spare himself as he details all the mistakes he made in his personal and professional life. Nor does he pull any punches about people who caused problems for him, like producers Dore Schary and Harry Cohn and actor Larry Hagman. That darkness is balanced by the breezy, fast-moving style and numerous amusing passages, including several in which Sheldon’s good friend Groucho Marx takes center stage.
Ultimately, though, THE OTHER SIDE OF ME is a pretty frustrating book. Sheldon concentrates so much on his movie and television careers that his work as a novelist is barely mentioned. He doesn’t even get to the point at which he finished his first novel, THE NAKED FACE (one that I haven’t read yet) until there are only ten pages left in the book. He barely touches on his other novels and the various movies and TV mini-series made from them, giving this memoir a definite unfinished feeling, as if it’s only the first half of something. Still, I raced right through it and had a fine time reading it, so I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys Sheldon’s novels or is interested in Hollywood during the glory days of the studio system and beyond.
I’ve read maybe half of those novels and enjoyed all of them. I’ll probably read the others eventually, because Sheldon, while not a great stylist, was an excellent storyteller, a master at making the reader want to find out what was going to happen next. The same thing is true of this memoir, which is written in a quasi-novelistic style with lots of dialogue, no doubt recreated from memory by Sheldon. How accurate it is is anybody’s guess, but it’s entertaining, that’s for sure. Sheldon writes at length about the battles with depression that plagued him all through his life, and he doesn’t spare himself as he details all the mistakes he made in his personal and professional life. Nor does he pull any punches about people who caused problems for him, like producers Dore Schary and Harry Cohn and actor Larry Hagman. That darkness is balanced by the breezy, fast-moving style and numerous amusing passages, including several in which Sheldon’s good friend Groucho Marx takes center stage.
Ultimately, though, THE OTHER SIDE OF ME is a pretty frustrating book. Sheldon concentrates so much on his movie and television careers that his work as a novelist is barely mentioned. He doesn’t even get to the point at which he finished his first novel, THE NAKED FACE (one that I haven’t read yet) until there are only ten pages left in the book. He barely touches on his other novels and the various movies and TV mini-series made from them, giving this memoir a definite unfinished feeling, as if it’s only the first half of something. Still, I raced right through it and had a fine time reading it, so I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys Sheldon’s novels or is interested in Hollywood during the glory days of the studio system and beyond.
