If You Would Have Told Me
A Memoir
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestseller
“...I love him, and I respect him, and I need him. We all do.”
—from the foreword by Jamie Lee Curtis
If you would have told a young John Stamos flipping burgers at his dad’s fast-food joint that one day he’d be a household name and that, at the height of his success, he’d be living alone, divorced, with no kids, high on a cocktail of forgetting, he might’ve asked, “You want fries with that?”
John burst onto the scene in General Hospital, propelling him into the teen idol stratosphere, a place that’s often a point of no return. But Stamos beat the odds and over the past four decades has proved himself to be one of his generation’s most successful and beloved actors. Whether showing off his comedic chops on Full House or his dramatic skills on ER, pushing the boundaries on Broadway or living out his youthful dreams as an honorary Beach Boy, John has surprised everyone, most of all himself.
A universal story about friendship, love, loss, and the courage to embrace love once more, John Stamos’s memoir is filled with some of the most memorable names in Hollywood, both old and new. Funny, deeply poignant, and brutally honest, If You Would Have Told Me is a portrait of a boy who went from believing in Disney magic to a man who learns that we have to create our own magical moments in life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this charming debut, Full House star Stamos reflects on fame and family. Cast in General Hospital at age 18 after failing to register for his first semester of business school, Stamos describes being in the public eye for his entire adulthood and the ways his parents tried to keep him grounded as his star rose—while Stamos shot his first seasons of the soap opera, his father insisted he continue covering the Sunday shift at the family diner in Orange County, Calif. After General Hospital, Stamos was recommended for the role of Uncle Jesse on Full House by director Garry Marshall. Here, Stamos complicates his suave, pretty-boy image with sincere and tender accounts of his painful divorce from actor Rebecca Romijn, struggles with sobriety, and grief over the deaths of his parents and Full House costar Bob Saget. There's plenty of fun, too, as when Stamos recounts unwittingly wearing fetish gear to an early audition in a naive attempt to impress a casting director, or staying home to scrapbook a wedding gift for his fiancée while she was away at her bachelorette party. These anecdotes, plus passages about being starstruck while touring as the Beach Boys' drummer, effectively humanize an actor often reduced to sex symbol status and reinforce his assertion that "fame and fortune is as fun as it is eventually empty; the simple stuff is the best stuff." Readers will be enchanted.
