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The Stories of my Life by James Patterson

Many thanks to both NetGalley and to Random House UK for letting me see an advance reader’s copy of The Stories of my Life.

From the moment I knew that this book was coming out, I wanted it. Therefore, I was delighted when I was approved to write a review.

The Stories of My Life by James Patterson is exactly that, filled with what appears to be lots of little anecdotes about, well, his life. I can imagine them being spoken during an after dinner speech, and it also appears that that’s where many of the stories originated: from speaking events.

The best bits for me were the ones about Patterson’s writing process. He’s one of the most prolific writers in the world and I was interested to see how he does it.

I’d also heard rumours that he wasn’t writing his own stories any more, and that did put me off reading him for a while. I was very happy to be corrected on this in that the books with only his name on the front are, in fact, written by him. Any others are co-written rather than ghostwritten and, hence, the co-writers also get a credit on the cover.

The copy I received was a scrappy, unedited draft and there were text dumps in various places, either copied and pasted in error, or the typist forgot to go back and cut out the extra, unwanted bits. This interfered with the reading for me, but I pressed on to the end regardless.

I would have liked to have known more about Patterson’s writing process, such as how many drafts does he write before the typist takes over, and then how many revisions. I also would have liked to know where the ideas come from before they land in his ideas file. It could also have been much longer for me.

However, I did enjoy it and I’m glad I read it. Every writer, or reader of James Patterson, would enjoy this book, I think.

Four stars.

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