Based on a True Story: A Memoir (Unabridged)

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

If you’re already a fan of comedian Norm Macdonald’s martini-dry delivery and deadpan weirdness, you probably expect his contribution to the world of celebrity memoirs to be a little different. But pretty much nothing will prepare you for how strange—and how very, very dark—Macdonald’s satire of the genre gets. We’re talking, like, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by way of Charles Bukowski. In Macdonald’s fictionalized telling of his story, he’s a lifelong morphine addict with a dangerous gambling problem who treats even his closest friends as disposable playthings. It’s funny—filled with zingy one-liners and hilariously bizarre scenes—but it’s also edgy and prickly. As a reader, Macdonald plays up this darkness and the surrealism, at times sounding uncannily like William S. Burroughs. That gleefully malevolent spirit always lurked in the background of Macdonald’s stand-up, but Based on a True Story is where the late comedian really let his dark sense of humor run wild.