About 4 stars for the concept and negative stars for the execution.

I'm really, really confused.

But let's start first. I was given a copy of The Author by The Author from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

"Lowbrow content. Highbrow craft."

- The first half of this review is correct. Highbrow could be replaced by pretentious. Craft could be replaced by 'and in want of an editor.'

So I didn't manage to finish this book. I tried very hard over the first two chapters and decided that this was a bridge too far. From what I gather, this is someone who curves around Hollywood wanting to be a screenwriter or just a general writer. It is a sort of Truman Capote-type figure, although with the stylings of Bret Easton Ellis. The drug references are numerous, and the action is frenzied and hard to pin down. However, there are parties, 'lesbians' who may or may not be lesbians, a car crash that was self-induced (the victim: "Apple bottom. Too many apple pies"), etc. Chapter 2 offers offensive observations on the NY subway and, from scanning a later chapter, value judgments like, "She was on the wrong side of ugly."

Instead of weaved cultural references, we have lines such as A Michelangelo becomes a van Gogh becomes a Picasso becomes a Pollock-like progress in reverse." Too many name-dropping references without a coherent narrative safely sunk the story and made me flick through aimlessly; the words become meaningless.

This was available to read now instead of during the normal requesting process. If this were a tongue-in-cheek novel, I would have enjoyed it. I would likely have requested it anyway, but I think this is very much a down-and-out with an intelligent bent kind of novel that is unreadable.

P.S.: The YouTube channel made so little sense...

I guess my expectations were too high. The descriptions intrigued me, and I was looking forward to reading a one-of-a-kind story about how Hollywood broke (or maybe didn’t break?) a person willing to sacrifice everything for fame. I also hoped for something in the vein of Matthew Perry’s memoir — an honest yet touching story.
Unfortunately, this book was a pretentious disappointment. From the very beginning, an agent warns that you won’t like it, and you know what? You really don’t. It manages to be both dull and outrageous at the same time. There’s no moral, no reason to root for the Author, only a vague hope that they’ll fail in their desperate, messy attempts at a breakthrough.
On top of that, the storytelling is utterly boring. The writing is bland, and the book is filled with scattered anecdotes, jumping back and forth between life events without truly engaging the reader. It felt as if the author was their own biggest failure, and this book was meant to be something, it it not..

lol, the pretentious verbiage turned me off three pages in. Now I get why the author didn’t assign his name - not because of the ‘debauchery’ that, let’s be honest, no one would care about. But because of the banal writing pretending to be intellectual and ‘special’. Truly have no interested in the rest of the book!

Did not finish. Felt too much like a gimmick and wasn't captivating for me. I wasn't drawn in by the writing, and the summary didn't do anything for me. I also couldn't find it on GoodReads, the primary platform I use to share activity and reviews.

Before starting this book, please, HEED THE WARNING!

Let me start by saying the idea of this novel and the entire roll-out is intriguing, The Author would say it ‘has legs’. You want to read it because you want to know if you can figure it out. You want the puzzle and the pay off and to rabbit-hole down some famous guys Wikipedia page.

The Author unfortunately reads more like a piece of poor slam poetry, pitifully hiding racist, homophobic, and misogynistic takes under the guise of “dark art”. Normally I am not so harsh, but I did not think I would ever read so many of those slurs so plainly on page and so often in a book publishing in 2025. There’s no thesis to support any sort of take on the use of these terms either: when they said “deplorable” they meant it. It’s graphic; there’s a sex scene that includes the words “paralyzed” and “disfigure” and “whimpering bleeding animal”, women feel like they serve the author only for the physical. Which I guess could also be because this guy is high off something or everything for like 75% of the book. My only sliver of a saving grace is that this entire thing must be satire—it has to be.

Reflecting on the early chapters, The Author describes his own writing as fast, aggressive, funny, and irreverent. It makes him feel dirty which is his only reaction to “Art” that feels authentic, so maybe that’s what this is: an attempt at art by being everything they can imagine a person would gape or gawk or grimace at. There’s an extreme excess of superfluous language such as “callipygian” and “apocryphal” that feels satirical in that they’re followed by words like “tush”, it pulled me right out of reading because I was googling.

In summation, the Author feels like if you fed ChatGPT every memoir of a 80’s, 90’s, 00’s, Hollywood star and asked it to write something you could call a Classic— and it spit out a pretentious, egotistical, maniacal, and confusing 300 page clump of words. It was all incredibly disjointed. What I will give The Author and its editors the props for is the attempt at trying to do something new, even though I feel strongly that there is no author at all. I think this is an attempt to see how the public responds to AI novels and the best disguise is something people already aren’t putting a lot of stake into, that can be called “semi auto-biographical”. I put a lot of trust into the authors I read, that even when satirical or critical or dark, the content is handled well. In this case I felt extremely let down.

I really wanted to enjoy this. But the fiction-masquerading-as-truth of it all made it a hard read. I think if I had known it was going to be written like that I could have enjoyed it more, but from a lot of the content I’m not sure I ever would have gotten all the way there. Someone will enjoy reading this, they’ll applaud the unique structure and the fresh perspective and the unflinching honesty, but, regrettably, I am not that reader.

Thank you to Netgalley and Meta Lit for the e-ARC! The premise of The Author intrigued me with the anonymous celebrity memoir premise but unfortunately didn’t hold up for me in the end. While the writing at times is so strong detailing absolute chaos in the author’s life and internal monologue, it felt so inflated and pretentious most of the time leaning into paying homage to many classic authors. The Author’s unlikeable morally unsound character was the only thing keeping me going to the end. By about a quarter of the way in, the mystery of who The Author is fizzled into me believing it was entirely fiction. While this didn’t really land for me personally, I think it will be a hit amongst fans of Bret Easton Ellis, Hunter S Thompson and other classic morally grey Los Angeles style authors.

This book was chaos— as is likely the story of someone’s rise to fame. The ugly side of Hollywood exposed in a way that has you 100% believing it while simultaneously thinking this is fiction. Over the top story telling, the author goes deeper than you would think in their own analysis of the ride he went on. Or did he—- still not sure.

I was excited to get an ARC because of the buzz I had heard about the book. I found the book to be pretty interesting with lots of inside scoop on making it in Hollywood. I liked the stories told by the author of the events that happened but it felt like some of the writing was “filler.” I still wonder if this is more of a memoir or fiction- something to ponder!

This book has such an interesting premise but ended up feeling like it was outrageous just to be outrageous. There are a lot of situations the Author gets into that feel extreme just to shock the reader. It's well-written and kept me engaged throughout the whole book, making me want to keep reading to see what else the Author would get into. But overall, it fell a bit flat from my expectations. I don't know how much of the premise is true (the whole "this is mostly based on true events but for liability reasons we're saying it's completely fiction"). That premise was what hooked me to begin with, but reading it, it feels very dramatized. I think I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't gone into it thinking it was potentially based on true events, but rather was marketed as "here's a fictional book about some fictional celebrity that blazes through Hollywood for his career". For me, this comes out to 4 stars out of 10, translating to a 2 star on a 5 star scale. I was intrigued but wouldn't read it again.

Was 'The Author' a memoir by a famous actor who wants to be an Author or just a publicity stunt? I wasn't sure when I first heard about this book and after completing it, I'm still not 100% certain. Overall I did enjoy the book despite the pretentiousness.