BOOKS
FROM UNDER THE TRUCK
AUTHOR JOSH BROLIN
A BROLIN STONE GATHERS NO MOSS
★★★★★
THERE’S A TRIED -and-true formula to the movie-star memoir. You get some chapters about humble beginnings, a slow rise to fame, then tales of on-set triumphs and giddy nights at the Oscars, all coated in a sheen of carefully calibrated modesty and gratitude. Well, Josh Brolin clearly didn’t get the handbook.
Under The Truck,
the Californian actor’s account of his turbulent life, is nothing if not unsanitised. It opens with a passage about his unruly, hard-drinking mother (whom we later learn gave her children wild mountain lions and timber wolves as playmates), which swiftly turns into Brolin masturbating in a motel room (“push two pillows together: instant vagina”). This is a book that clearly has not been within 100 yards of a Hollywood publicist.