Then It Fell Apart by Moby

If you publish a memoir detailing affairs with famous women, you need to get your facts right, said Kevin FitzPatrick in Vanity Fair. That, alas, is something the DJ and musician Moby drastically failed to do in this autobiography. In it, he claims to have dated Natalie Portman when she was 20; the actress has contested that account, saying that all she could recall was an “older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school”. Moby, having tried to brazen it out, has now apologised. Yet this is still a “compelling” memoir, said Victoria Segal in The Sunday Times. Moby grew up dirt poor in Connecticut dreaming of wealth and fame; thanks to the “monstrous global success” of his album Play, he got both at the age of 33. Suddenly, he could afford a $6m “sky castle” in Manhattan, and was being invited to dinner parties hosted by Bono and David Bowie. But it wasn’t long before he began bingeing on drink and drugs and grew “wildly promiscuous”. His downward spiral reached its nadir in 2008, when he “tied a bin bag over his head and waited to die”. The relentless debauchery depicted isn’t always easy to read about, but the book is redeemed by its author’s hard-won wisdom and his “willingness to show himself in the harshest of lights”.

Not exactly, said Joe Clay in The Times. Moby devotes much of the memoir to reminding us how “staggeringly famous” he was. Nor do the endless one-night stands with beautiful women sit easily with his self-depiction as someone racked with self-doubt. Equally off-putting are his boastful “frat-boy antics”: he accepted a dare at a party to brush the “real estate developer” Donald Trump with his exposed penis. In the end, this memoir is “like a self-indulgent double album – bloated and overlong, but with the odd corking anecdote”.