Having grown up I can accept that David Cassidy’s teen idol career was not an accurate reflection of the person he really was. This is the first of his memoirs so I’m glad he got to a point where he could accept his teenybopper success and more particularly The Partridge Family. I was a huge fan of that show and a Partridge Family album was the first LP I ever owned. Still think the music is brilliant! I’ll definitely be looking for his second memoir where he moves into adulthood, parenthood and middle age. ( )

David Cassidy had a lot to be bitter about during the years when he was the number one teen idol in the world. He was a teenager being exploited by experienced adults, and the well-meaning adults who were on his side didn’t have the experience to fully see what was happening or protect him from it. He spent some of the most formative years of his life in an exhausting whirlwind. When the whirlwind finally passed, he didn’t have the mental or emotional maturity to cope with the experience or the life that followed. Having Jack Cassidy as a father meant all this was layered over a childhood full of rejection, and then an adolescence and young adulthood poisoned by Jack’s envy.

Cassidy strives to keep an upbeat tone while being bluntly honest about the dark side of his experiences, but his lack of actual depth or introspection is painful and disappointing. The book ends optimistically, describing his then-current Broadway run in “Blood Brothers” (with brother Shaun), his happy marriage, hard but successful experience in therapy, and his ongoing friendship with and support of fellow Partridge alum Danny Bonaduce.

As another reviewer wrote: If only it had ended there.

This edition of the book has an afterword written by Cassidy’s writing collaborator, describing the tragic years that followed: a return to drinking, the failure of his marriage, his DUI arrests and rehab, and too-young death.

As I read, I kept remembering the poignant last line of Carrie Fisher’s memoir "The Princess Diarist”: “What if I had been allowed to be only Carrie?”

What if David Cassidy had trusted his gut and never gotten on the Partridge Family bus? Would he have ended up as the dramatic actor and blues-rock singer he wanted to be? Would he have been able to truly “get happy”? ( )

As a young teen, I was, of course, head-over-heels in love with the pretty, androgynous David Cassidy. And why not? He had stunning good looks, and his Keith Partridge character was a lovable, silly, goofball.

But Cassidy himself was the opposite. A self-proclaimed hippie , this 19-year-old boy was wild for sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll--NOT the sweet pap featured on the hit show. It's well-known by now that he took every advantage of the many girls throwing themselves at him, and the book makes it abundantly clear that he resented his father tremendously and hated the whole teenage-idol routine, even while he availed himself of the advantages that came his way. In this book he seems very bitter about the way his image was used and abused, and that's understandable. This is an interesting book; but I recently discovered that he's written a more up-to-date memoir, and look forward to reading that one for comparison's sake. ( )