Finished: Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe

I love Rob Lowe. I always have. There were pictures of him hanging in my room when I was a teenager. I absolutely adored him as Sam Seaborn on The West Wing, and I think the show suffered when he left (which I found out was because they wouldn't give him a raise while everyone else got significant ones over the first four seasons).

When I saw that he'd written an autobiography, I knew I had to read it. He has so many great stories to share, like filming amateur movies with Chris and Sean Penn, Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen. How he was able to get a tour of the Star Wars set before anyone even knew what the movie was. How Cary Grant befriended him as a kid and many other wonderful stories.

He writes with candor and gives enough gossip to slightly satisfy (but doesn't really get into the dirty stuff you know went down in the 80s as he partied it up with Charlie Sheen). He talks about the women in his life - Darryl Hannah, Princess Stephanie of Monaco, Melissa Gilbert and others - and then the one woman who stole his heart and gave him the life he'd always wanted.

I loved finding out that Mike Myers wrote the part of the young Number 2 in the Austin Powers movies after he did an impression of Robert Wagner on the golf course. Or that Patrick Swayze actually wrote "She's Like the Wind" and begged the producers of the movie "Youngblood" but they wouldn't use it. I cried a little when I read his recount of how he was actually on the "rehearsal" American Airlines flight 77 between Washington DC and LAX on August 30, 2001 with the terrorists that eventually crashed that same flight into the Pentagon a few weeks later.

If you are a child of the 80s, this is a must-read book. It will make you laugh and even cry a little, but in the end you'll wish that you could just sit down with Rob Lowe and hear the stories firsthand - and also stare at him because the man has seriously aged very well!