This Is Your Life Book

It's a big night at the London Palladium. Jimmy Conway is about to perform his stand-up comedy routine in front of two thousand invited guests and millions live on TV. He steps out blinking into the spotlights and waits for the applause to die down. He tries to appear confident but he can't help wondering whether he should have shared his little secret with someone by now. Jimmy has never performed anything before-ever. How did he get here? Following the death of a national celebrity, the under-achieving Jimmy convinces a naive journalist that he is the latest comedy phenomenon. He then embarks on a series of misadventures, bluffing and stumbling his way up the celebrity ladder, discovering as he goes that in their desperation to be associated with the next big thing, nobody has bothered to check his credentials. Quicker than you can say "flavor of the month," Jimmy Conway becomes a bogus celebrity, winning an award for something he never did, being photographed in magazines posing in someone else's house, and ultimately fooling, and making a fool of, the entire celebrity industry. Sharp, witty, and hilarious, This Is Your Life is a funny, stinging look at our celebrity-obsessed society.

Publishers Weekly

U.K. television writer and author O'Farrell (Global Village Idiot; The Best a Man Can Get) brings his very British brand of self-flagellating humor to his latest novel, a scathing satire of celebrity culture and the numbing effects of fame. Jimmy Conway, a part-time teacher and aspiring screenwriter, receives a bundle of letters on his birthday, delivered by his overachieving older brother. The grandiose letters, which Jimmy wrote as a boy to James Conway, his future self, highlight the aimlessness of his life. "It wasn't what I'd written that embarrassed me, it was the obvious and enormous gulf between what I'd hoped to become and who I now was that made me feel so humiliated," Jimmy realizes. But soon he finds himself catapulted toward the fame and fortune he always dreamed of when he takes advantage of happenstance to launch a career as a stand-up comic. O'Farrell skewers the media: through journalistic shoddiness, Jimmy becomes a nationally known stand-up comic, even though no one has ever seen him perform. He gets his first break when TV journalists take him for a friend of a famous comedian in their greed for a sound bite. Later, a dishonest critic gives him a brilliant review because she's too lazy to come to his show, and from there, the publicity snowballs. Jimmy's epistolary advisories from his young self appear at the start of each chapter, usually in comic contrast to the reality of his adult life. O'Farrell delivers an amusing farce. Agent, Georgia Garrett, A.P. Watt. (May) Forecast: Media satires are abundant, and this British version may get lost in the shuffle, but O'Farrell who has written jokes for the speeches of Tony Blair mines a rich vein with skill and vigor. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.