I've always had a soft spot for Ricky Martin. On top of putting out some fun and catchy music, a lot of it quite underrated these days, he also just seemed like a generally nice guy. Needless to say I was very interested in reading his memoir, but even just a few pages into it I could already tell it was going to be a struggle to get through, even though I did persist to the very end.
As we all probably know by now, Ricky Martin is a very spiritual person, and the bulk of this book tells of his journey along that path. That alone doesn't bother me; in fact in a lot of ways I can relate to the tales of self reflection and the general "there's got to be more to life than this" moments of despair. Everyone should take a few minutes to breathe. However, that's basically ALL he seems to want to talk about. Even before these spiritual revelations, which are relatively recent, he seems to retroactively place this current mindset on past events, speaking of how he would view them taking place now as opposed to what he felt at the time. I can't tell you how many times he writes something off as "my destiny," or "it was time," or "was meant to be." Okay, but how did you feel? How did you react? He relies on this sort of generic "aligning of the cosmos" rhetoric way too much and in the end I feel like very little of his own personality came through because of it. Not only did it make for an extremely dull read, it also caused me to roll my eyes and scoff outloud many, many times at some of the cornball things he said, which is bad since I'm usually open to that kind of sentiment - in small doses. I just don't believe him to be as deep as he thinks.
Plus he pretty much breezes over major points in his life I'm sure his fans would like to know more about. The song writing process for one, could have been really interesting to read about. Or some fun anecdotes from his time with Menudo. A closer look at his relationship with his family, perhaps? I'm not necessarily asking for juicy sex life gossip or anything (not that it could hurt at this point, lol), but nothing here is especially revelatory or fascinating. At all. Like I said, this is all basically text book Ricky Martin, rather than a first person account of actual events. I will say that I did appreciate and admire his thoughts on fatherhood, philanthropy, child trafficking, and all the hard work he puts into his foundations around the world, and that shone through just fine. He's still an A+ guy, even if this book did him no favors in making him more relatable to the majority of his audience.
Listen, I know it's his book, his life, his story, and he can tell it any way he wants to. But that's just it - it didn't seem like he wanted to. For an autobiography, it struck me as awfully guarded, which defeats the purpose of penning one in the first place in my opinion. Recommended for only the most die hard fans and collectors.
