Just brought this one home yesterday. Yes, I have 4 papers due Monday. Yes, I have a full-time job and two children with many end-of-year activities. But I also have a weakness for celebrity biographies - the trashier the better - and come on. It's ROB LOWE. I'm thinking he's got some stories to tell. Plus, the back cover photo is...well...inspiring. Pure eye candy and the reading is pure mind candy. Awesome.

Well, I'm finished. Rob, what can I say? You dished...sort of. Although the celebrity stories were fun, the "Aw shucks I'm just a geeky guy" thing didn't quite work for me. Dude, you are one of the hottest men ever in life. It's just a fact. And to pretend that your beauty hasn't affected your experience in life is just silly. Sure, I accept that beautiful people can feel insecure and have problems. But I don't buy for one second that it was just happenstance that you ended up where you did. People are drawn to you because you are drop-dead gorgeous. You can't tell me in one sentence that you were such a geek that Malibu high school kids wouldn't let you surf (what? They had access to the whole ocean and the ability to keep you from it?) and then share the story about how you lost your virginity when you were seduced at 14 on that same Malibu beach. Those two things do not compute, Rob.

Typical of most celebrity bios, Rob glossed over some of the more unsavory aspects of his past. He barely discusses Melissa Gilbert, although he does acknowledge that he didn't treat her well. Still, according to her book, he knocked her up and left her, which is bit crappier than he admits to. And he also barely mentions his sex-on-tape scandal from 1988. I didn't know anything about it, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. I wouldn't judge him too harshly for most sexy hijinks - sure, banging two women, one of them a 16 year old, on videotape is undoubtedly unsavory, but I think it was consensual. A 16 year old is young enough that she hasn't outgrown stupid, but old enough to say "yes" and mean it. But the part that is more repugnant is that Rob was having sex with a woman or women with one of his friends taking a turn as well. Not as a threesome but as a bonding experience. That goes past unsavory to flat out wrong.

The sex scandal prompted Rob to go to rehab for alcohol abuse. He claimed to love rehab, which struck me as especially self-involved. Isn't it supposed to be painful to work out your addiction by figuring out what makes you tick? Not for Rob, who enjoys getting to know himself this way. He's just such a fascinating guy after all. In a self-deprecating kind of way.

I'm sounding harsher than I mean to about this book. Rob doesn't seem to be a bad guy. And his stories and observations about the people he came into contact with were interesting. He opens the book by gushing about Robert Kennedy Jr. in such a way that I thought this was an introduction to the book by someone else, written about Rob. I think he was trying to show that he was subject to hero worship and being upstaged by a better looking man just like an average Joe. What it demonstrated to me, though, that he had to compare himself to someone who was not only good-looking but was American's form of royalty to top himself.

I guess I just can't quite forgive him for not being Sam Seaborn.