Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography

An Autobiograpby

Title: Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
Author: Neil Patrick Harris
Narrator: Neil Patrick Harris
Publisher: Random House Audio
Publication Year: 2014
ISBN: 9780385367950
Rating: 5 stars

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I have a confession to make—a confession that I fear will send angry mobs after me with pitchforks and torches—but here it goes: I do not like Choose Your Own Adventure Books. I read a few as a teenager, and as someone who is into writing and publishing, I think the form is really interesting, but as a reader, I find them extremely anxiety inducing. I have only recently become the type of person who can quit reading a book if they aren’t enjoying it, but I have yet to be the kind of person who can consider a book read if I haven’t read all of it. I can’t pick up a book to read it and then put it down satisfied when I know there are pages in there that I haven’t read. And let’s not even talk about the decision fatigue I have from my regular life. So a book where you have to make a decision at the end of every chapter and intentionally skip chapters makes me want to throw up a little bit. I choose my own adventure when I decide what book I’m going to read and the only decision I want to make while reading is whether or not I’m going to stop for the night after this chapter.

But, when I saw this book on a take shelf at the PRH offices back in 2015, I was intrigued by the idea of an autobiography written in a Choose Your Own Adventure format. How would that even work? So I grabbed it off the shelf and took it back to my cubicle where it sat on a shelf because I was just too anxious about it to start it. When I left PRH in 2017, it got packed into a box with the other stuff from my cubicle then got transported back to my tiny NYC apartment. From there, it went to my parents’ house for a bit, then a temporary storage unit, then to my new apartment in West Virginia, and finally to my house, where it has been sitting on my TBR shelf for the past five years (almost to the day). This book has been in my life longer than some of my friends.

When I decided it was time to finally tackle this book that has been taunting me from a shelf for a decade now, I was surprised to find that it also had an audiobook edition. So then I was even more confused—how can a Choose Your Own Adventure book have an audiobook?! Since I was still a little intimidated about cracking the physical copy, I listened to the audiobook instead, which is the version I’m highlighting in this review. However, for research purposes, I also skimmed through the hardcover after finishing the audiobook just to see the similarities and differences between the two formats. The audiobook is narrated by NPH himself, and I really love when authors read their own memoirs/autobiographies and NPH is a master performer, so the audiobook is a really fun listen.

My biggest takeaway here is that you can read this book like a traditional book and just start at the beginning and read from beginning to end (I spent ten years fretting over nothing). Either way, the stories don’t all go in strict chronological order and there is a bunch of other side content in the book that breaks up the story line anyway. You don’t have to go in a certain order for the story to make sense, especially if you are at all familiar with NPH’s work and career. That becomes obvious in the audiobook because in that format you can’t “turn to page 278” or anything like that. Each chapter ends with options to “skip ahead” to a future chapter or “wait a bit” for the chapter that comes next in order, but there isn’t an easy way to navigate the audiobook if you want to skip ahead, plus if you are listening while driving, that could be dangerous. The book is set up with reference page numbers if you want to read it like a more traditional Choose Your Own Adventure book, but because the audiobook locks you in, I think it was the best format for me.

As the cover blurb declares on both formats of the book “You are the star in N.P.H.’s life story!” That’s right, like a traditional Choose Your Own Adventure book, this book is written in the second person (Ex: “You are born in Albuquerque, New Mexico” vs. “I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico” or “Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico"). Personally, I think writing in the second person is really, really challenging (probably even more so if the writing is an autobiography), but when done well can have a great pay off. I think this one was done well. The writing was clear and easy to follow and the second person achieved its goal of really dragging me into the story and making me think and feel about NPH’s life the way he does.

The book starts with NPH’s birth and moves through his introduction to acting and magic and his career both on screen and on stage. Throughout he is gracious and offers kind insights on many of the people he has worked with through the years of his career. Also interspersed with these stories are brief entries written by some of these notable friends reflecting on their relationships with NPH.

In addition to his career, NPH also talks about his sexuality and how he went from trying to hook up with girls while playing Dougie Howser to thinking he was bisexual to realizing he was gay. He talks about how while being out to his friends and family, he kept his sexuality out of his career until Perez Hilton publicly outed him. One of the notes in the book is written by Hilton, so it does sound like Hilton made amends for that and that the two are on good terms. After being outed by Hilton, NPH talks about making the decision not just to publicly come out but to also use his platform for LGBTQ+ advocacy, even though he had wanted to keep his advocacy and his private life more private. He talks about his relationship with now husband, David Burtka, including the story of how they first met complete with Burtka’s commentary. In the hardcopy of the book, Burtka’s comments are written in the margins, but in the audiobook Burtka makes a guest appearance to put his two cents in while NPH reads. I thought that was funny and cute and even over audio you can hear their chemistry.

The part of the book that was the biggest revelation to me were the stories surrounding the couple’s children Harper and Gideon. By the time their kids were born in 2010, I didn’t really care about celebrity gossip as much and Burtka and Harris tried to keep their kids’ lives pretty private for their safety and wellbeing. In the book, NPH talks about the process of finding a surrogate and egg donor (after, he states, trying and finding themselves unable to get each other pregnant the old fashioned way). While Harper and Gideon are twins, Burtka is the biological father of one and Harris is the biological father of the other. At the time of writing, NPH had his suspicions about which man fathered which child, but they didn’t know for sure and didn’t feel like it mattered to find out. I was amazed to learn how much security they hired to protect the babies in their early days. I know celebrities often have to go to great lengths to protect their privacy and any scraps of normalcy their children can have, but I never realized how much coordination and, I guess, hired muscle can be involved in trying to protect celebrity children from prying eyes. The kids were three when the book was written and they are about to turn fifteen this year, but it does seem like other than the occasional public appearance with their dads, Harper and Gideon have been protected from the limelight.

Overall, I was impressed by how fun and upbeat this book is. Other than a few documented celebrity spats with people like Dustin Diamond, and a really tasteless Amy Winehouse charcuterie platter at a 2011 party, NPH seems like a pretty unproblematic fave (though there are a lot of articles published in the aftermath of the charcuterie platter incident that argue that my assessment may be incorrect—people were extremely, and justifiably, upset about that—so maybe I’m just uninformed). He’s not someone like the aforementioned Dustin Diamond, RIP, where pretty much everyone who ever worked with him had something negative to say about him. I hate when celebrity memoirs and autobiographies turn into pity parties and this one stays well clear of that terrain.

Beyond the text of the book, it also has some extras: a couple of recipes, some photos, and a crossword. These appear throughout the hard copy of the book, but do come as a supplemental PDF with the audiobook so you don’t miss out in that format. The physical book has a couple of fun extras like pages that none of the other pages send you to so NPH riffs on the Choose Your Own Adventure experience (one gives readers a password in case they ever meet NPH in person and one where he would have sign if you found it and took it to him while he was on book tour). There are a few pages at the end of the physical edition that talk about NPH loving Twitter through a few tweets on the subject. They are formatted like Tweets and it’s mostly a visual gag rather than anything that must be read for the value of the book, but this chapter is missing from the audiobook (I couldn’t access the bonus PDF on my app, so they might be in there and I wouldn’t know). I’m not sure whether it’s because it wouldn’t make as much sense if you couldn’t see the formatting or for another reason (many of the articles arguing that NPH is problematic use his Tweets as their examples and the charcuterie debacle was shared on Twitter, which is how the public found out, so I can imagine a situation where that section was cut from digital or later printings of the book).

I thought this book was light, inspirational, and laugh out loud funny. The format and the extras were fun and unexpected and the Choose Your Own Adventure format turned out not to be as daunting as I have imagined for the past decade. It took me a while to decide to read this book, but I’m glad I kept it through all of these years and that I finally took a chance on it!