I’ve just begun listening to this audiobook, and so far it’s terrific. The book’s charming, poignant, and observant (not to say obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant), and Steve Martin’s delivery as a reader adds an extra layer of wistfulness and wonder that has me enthralled as I listen. This is really something quite special.

Martin’s career took off just at just about the midpoint of my undergraduate career. I knew him only from his records and a couple of SNL sketches (I pretty much stopped watching TV when I got to college). When he came to Wake Forest University in the fall of my junior year, I was excited, but not a big enough fan to understand just what I would be seeing. I soon found out.

It was an extraordinary show in every respect. Martin seemed able to transform anything he saw or heard in the moment into part of his comedy. At one point he spotted someone taping the show on a handheld cassette recorder. He chided him–“ah-aaaah-ah”–walked down to the man, got the recorder, went back up on stage, rewound the tape, and began playing back the recording. When the playback got to a big laugh on the tape, he looked up and said to us, “Hey, listen, that’s you!” The way he said it, as if he’d never seen the miracle of tape recording before, was funny beyond belief.

Something rich and strange in this man’s comic imagination. Hearing the autobiography doesn’t explain the gift, but it does tell a story of how gifts look and feel as they emerge. Steve Martin’s interior life is as full of yearning as Brian Wilson’s–and nearly as melodic. Highly recommended.