Elvis, the New Rage: A Radio History from 1945 to 1955 Book

Memoir City
I'm currently completely obsessed with memoirs, and was excited to pick up Ricky Martin's Me. I was in love with Little Ricky Martin during the Menudo craze. This book was published in both English and Spanish ("Yo"), and became a bestseller. I honestly wonder why.

You, Too, Can Have a Career in Ghostwriting!
Whoever ghost-wrote this thing should be drug out behind a woodshed somewhere and smacked around with a stylebook. It is horribly, terribly written. Nearly every single sentence begins with the pronoun "I," therefore making it exceedingly choppy. Yes, I get that it's an AUTObiography and written in the first person, but dear God. Throw us a bone, would you, and start a sentence with something other than a first-person pronoun?

Besides being choppy, Ricky fell prey to the dreaded Punctuating! Almost! Every! Sentence! With! An! Exclamation! Point! After a while, I could just scan over a paragraph to tell if Ricky was really passionate about that particular point of his life. After a while, you feel like you're reading the diary of a middle school girl.

300+ Pages That Really Say ... Nothing!
If you're looking for substance, you're not going to get it in this autobiography. You're better off doing a search for interviews OF Ricky Martin by other people. A few examples:

The Introductory Chapter
I swear to Heaven, my eyes glazed over. I had to re-read sentences in this pseudo-existential, stream-of-consciousness verbal diarrhea. If it had extended any further, I would've tossed the book completely. It made little sense and was just pointless. Ricky gives his philosophy on life and waxes on about how "life is a journey" and "life takes lots of twists and turns" and "life's lessons are like a series of closed doors." Oh, spare us, Ricky. You're not a philosopher.

His Time in Menudo
As a Menudo fangirl, I wanted to know about what it was like living on the road and being a part of the original boy band. While Martin does a great job describing wanting to be in the group and auditioning/getting the gig, he tells very little about the ins and outs of his time there. He complains about only getting $400/month due to an agreement set up by his parents and lawyers (the rest was put in a trust for him to access when he turned 18), the next thing you read is that his "four years" with the band was a great experience and he moves to New York City without telling anyone. Hunh?

His "Relationships"
Super-duper vague. Outside of giving a bit more detail about 4 individuals (2 female, 2 male), all you read is "I had relationships with both men and women." Hunh? Were they meaningful? How long did they last? Did you cohabitate? Did they meet your parents? Did you drunk-dial them at 3am, pining after them? Did you dump them, or did they dump you? How did you hide the relationships with the men from the media before you came out? No clues here.

What Did We Learn?
Well, a few things...

- Ricky gives us a few good chapters on his acting experience, which I didn't know about
- Ricky is a total workaholic and "yes man." Chapter after chapter sees him tackling project after project until he is nearly at the point of collapse and wandering around his house like a zombie in his PJs
- Ricky thinks he's deep. He goes on a "spiritual journey" that's actually pretty boring and self-involved
- Ricky is a philanthropist. Actually, I had no idea about his children's foundations, so that was interesting

One area of the book that was rewarding was how he "got" his children, who were born via surrogacy. It's obvious that Martin loves his children and will probably be a great dad as he applies the over-achieving facets of his personality to fatherhood. I do wish him the best of luck in this area, and to his children as well.

Labels, Labels, Labels
Ricky Martin outed himself on his website and also on his Twitter. He claims/ed to be a "homosexual man." However, in the book he does not even come close to referencing what most homosexual men reveal ... the time when they first knew they were gay. Martin needed to keep a "clean" (read: hetero) image for his career, especially when he was entering puberty in the spotlight. He talks about dumping his virginity to a female because he just wanted to be rid of it, and how the experience was just O.K.

Of course it would be, if your heart wasn't in it. But that doesn't make you GAY.

Martin's male-to-female ratio in this book when it comes to relationships is nearly 50-50. He talks about being addicted to certain women - to their smell, having sexual relations with them, being around them. Being a card-carrying Friend of the Gays and having gay bestie for the past 26 years, I can honestly say that none of my homosexual male friends can relate to this or have ever likened having sex with a woman to being addicted to crack! Not a one. I'm not a fan of labels, but what Martin describes in this book is bisexual (or, hetero/homo-flexible). I was not expecting a huge section of the book to be a gayer-than-a-Christmas-party coming-out revelation, but what Martin described was nothing that I had remotely expected.

Sexual Preference Spoiler:
Martin is comfortable with/enjoys having sex with both genders, but can only see himself having a committed, settled-down, grownup relationship with a man. Whoo. This may or may not change, in my honest opinion, if he meets a woman that meets all of his qualifications of being his soulmate. I'm a chick, and I'll totally admit that we're pretty tricky sometimes. I don't blame Martin at all for saying he envisions his future life partner as being a dude. ;)


So, Should You Pick It Up?
NO. Don't. You may want to keep it near the commode as some back-up reading once you run out of magazines, but don't buy it. The writing is so elementary and it really has no pizzazz or substance.