Start Date: 26/08/21 End Date: 01/08/21

Genre/ Tropes: Memoir, Biography, Pop Culture, Non Fiction

Summary: A biography on iconic actor River Phoenix chronicling his life growing up in a cult to being one of the most famous actors from the mid 80s to early 90s to his untimely death from a drug overdose in 1993.

Throughts: This is actually the first time I've ever read a biography seeing as I tend to read more fiction, but god damn this is a pretty good biography!!! Like I honestly couldn't put it down. It's about actor River Phoenix. I don't think a lot of people know who he is seeing as though he died in 1993 and he wasn't really in a lot of movies, but the movies he was in was what made him so memorable. (If you've ever watched Stand by Me, he was the blonde kid. He was also in he second Indiana Jones movie). But this biography centers around his life growing up in the Children of God cult (google it, it is WILD) and how it kinda affected him growing up and eventually becoming a movie actor, as well as his eventual spiral into drugs and his eventual accidental overdose.

I remember this one part in the book where it kinda insinuates how he was voluntarily celibate from like the age of 10 to 14 because he had lost his virginity at age 4 whilst living in the cult. Keep in mind though that he had left the cult at age 7, so he was still sexually active for 3 years after the cult.

I was also doing some research on this and from what I've gathered is that River Phoenix was the original Leonardo DiCaprio. Like a lot of the movie roles that Leo had in his early career was originally meant for River but was given to Leo after River died. E.g Basketball Diaries, Man in the Iron Mask. James Cameron also kinda made the character of Jack Dawson with River Phoenix in mind for Titanic. Its crazy how different Leo's career would have been if River hadn't had overdosed.

Memorable Quotes: " 'I don't think anybody's necessarily ready for death' Johnny Depp reflected. 'You can only hope that when it approaches, you feel like you've said what you wanted to say. Nobody wants to go out mid sentence.'"

Reread?: Maybe in the future? But I feel like I already got the information.

Recommend?: Absolutely!!!! But reading this book after watching his movies is probably what made reading this so great cuz it's kinda like a behind the scenes.