http://community.livejournal.com/rent/1788961.html#cutid1 For those who can't make it out:
This “Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical Rent” definitely demands an avid interest in the 1996 rock opera. But Rapp’s book is no roar-of-the-crowd, smell-of-the-greasepaint scrapbook; it’s a sprawling, tear-streaked life story and unabashedly sentimental ode to his mother (she died of adrenal cancer in 1997). Rapp’s personal and professional lives were like warped mirror images: As Rent went from workshop to Tony-winning theatrical sensation (Rapp played cynical filmmaker Mark), the actor watched his mother waste away. “I wanted desperately, selfishly, to be there…for her final moments. To live that dramatic deathbed scene from so many movies,” he writes. His prose can be clunky and overwrought, but his voice is unpretentious and unfailingly honest. A rare (and refreshing) occurrence in a showbiz memoir.
And they gave the book a B.
I recognize the addiction to being alive.
