Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin

I kind of love listening to memoirs written by celebrities and read by those same celebrities as audiobooks. Born Standing Up is one of those, written by Steve Martin and read by him, telling the story of his stand-up comedy career and how he started from nothing and got famous. I felt like it was kind of a sad story in a lot of ways, starting with his childhood with a distant and angry father, and with his struggles with depression and anxiety even as he became famous. It was really interesting learning about how the stand-up comedy world works, and how he slowly came up with his own bits over years and years and years of hard work, and how he went from being an opener for bigger acts to being the biggest act in stand-up comedy in the seventies. He didn't really go into his later career--he talked a little bit about how he started to transition into movies, but he was mainly focusing on his stand-up and he stopped there. That was my only real complaint with this book--it felt incomplete to only talk about a ten- or fifteen-year span of Steve Martin's career when there was so much after it. But I guess that was the point of the book for him. It was only about four hours of listening, so it was quick, easy, and interesting. A great combination, particularly since the last three or four audiobooks I've been listening to have all been 16+ hours, so I needed something short!