Elton John – Bedtime Biography: Me: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: Me: Elton John Official Autobiography
• Author: Elton John, Alexis Petridis (ghostwriter)
• Genre: Autobiography / Memoir / Music Biography
• Pages: 416
• Published Year: 2019
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Language: English
• Awards: Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

Audio Summary

Synopsis

So here’s a kid from working-class London with a volcanic-tempered mother and an emotionally absent father. He can play piano melodies at age three. He’s enrolled at the Royal Academy of Music but would rather ride the tube dreaming of rock and roll than practice Mozart. Fast forward a few decades and he’s one of the best-selling artists on the planet, battling addiction, navigating fame’s chaos, and somehow-somehow-surviving it all. ‘Me’ is Elton John’s attempt to cram seventy-plus years of sequined, drug-fueled, heartbreaking, hilarious life into one book. It’s messy. It’s long. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a man who never learned to do anything halfway.

Key Takeaways

• The Big Idea: Fame doesn’t fix childhood trauma-it just gives you more expensive ways to avoid dealing with it
• The Controversial Point: Elton spends a lot of ink on celebrity friendships, which some readers find shallow and name-droppy
• The Actionable Part: His brutal honesty about addiction and recovery could genuinely help someone struggling with the same demons
• The Hidden Gem: The early chapters about his childhood and discovering Elvis are surprisingly tender and beautifully written

My Summary

A Three-Year-Old at the Piano and a Lifetime of Chaos

Look, I picked this up because I was tired. Tired of self-help books promising transformation, tired of novels that felt like they were written by committee. I wanted something real. Something from someone who’d actually lived. And say what you will about Elton John-the man has lived.

The book opens where you’d expect a memoir to start: childhood. But this isn’t some glossy “oh, I always knew I was destined for greatness” story. Nope. Elton’s childhood was rough. His mother, Sheila, sounds terrifying-volatile, explosive, always looking for a fight. His father Stanley? Absent, and when he wasn’t absent, he was punishing young Reginald Dwight (yep, that’s Elton’s real name) for the way he ate celery. Celery. The man couldn’t catch a break.

And yet-and here’s the thing that gets me-music was already there. At three years old, the kid could hear a melody and play it back on the piano. That’s not talent. That’s something else entirely.

The Royal Academy, Elvis, and Choosing Your Own Path

There’s this great moment where young Elton sees a picture of Elvis in a barbershop magazine and his whole world cracks open. Elvis looked like an alien, he says. Sounded like one too. But in a good way. (I love that distinction-“in a good way.” So much of Elton’s life would be weird “in a good way.”)

He gets into the Royal Academy of Music at 11-prestigious, classical, very proper. And he hates it. Not because he’s not good enough. Because they won’t let him play what he wants to play. So he starts skipping classes, riding the London Underground, daydreaming about rock and roll instead of Beethoven.

As someone who left traditional publishing because I got sick of “proper,” this hit different. Sometimes the institution isn’t wrong, exactly. It just isn’t you.

The Writing: Engaging but Wobbly

Here’s where I put on my former-novelist hat. Elton worked with ghostwriter Alexis Petridis, and you can feel it-mostly in a good way. The voice is warm, conversational, genuinely funny. Elton sounds like himself, which is harder to pull off than people think.

But. (There’s always a but.)

The book is long. 416 pages of anecdotes. And some of those anecdotes? They drag. There are stretches where you’re like, “Okay, another celebrity dinner party, another wild drug story, I get it.” The pacing wobbles. Some chapters sprint, some shuffle.

And yeah, the criticism that it’s sometimes too focused on celebrity friendships? Valid. There are moments where it reads more like a guest list than a memoir. But then he’ll hit you with something so raw and vulnerable about his addiction or his relationship with his mother and you forgive everything.

The Stuff That Actually Hurts

The addiction stuff is no joke. Elton doesn’t flinch from it. Cocaine, alcohol, food-he threw himself into destruction with the same intensity he brought to his music. And his honesty here isn’t performative. It’s not “look how I overcame everything.” It’s messier than that. More human.

Same with the family trauma. The way his childhood shaped his need for love, for attention, for more of everything-you can trace a straight line from that celery-punishing father to the man snorting cocaine at the height of his fame. It’s not pretty. It’s true.

Who This Book Is Actually For

If you want a deep musicological analysis of Elton’s work, this ain’t it. He talks about the songs, sure, but he’s more interested in the stories behind them than the craft of making them. Which is fine! He’s a performer, not a professor.

If you want to understand how a person survives fame-like, actually survives it when so many don’t-this is your book. If you want messy, honest, sometimes-too-long storytelling from someone who earned every scar he’s showing you, dive in.

If you’re sensitive to addiction content, heads up. It’s not gratuitous, but it’s there. A lot.

The Verdict

Is “Me” a perfect memoir? God, no. It’s shaggy, it name-drops too much, and it could’ve lost 50 pages easy. But perfect is boring. And this book-like the man-is anything but boring. It’s got heart. It’s got chaos. It’s got a three-year-old playing piano melodies he only heard once.

That’s enough for me.