My review of My Father Bryce, by Adam Courtenay

My Father Bryce

by Adam Courtenay

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

My Father Bryce is a calm, deliberate attempt to understand a man who spent his life shaping stories, including those he told himself about himself. 

Bryce Courtenay’s public identity is familiar to most Australians: bestselling novelist whose books sold in tens of millions, charismatic speaker, and one who dominated the publishing landscape from the release of The Power of One onward. 

Son Adam Courtenay’s focus is the private man behind that public one. What emerges is a portrait built from observation rather than accusation.

Bryce’s early life in South Africa was unstable, fatherless and marked by illegitimacy. Those circumstances created a psychological terrain influencing all that followed. From that childhood came the habit his sons later called 'Dad facts', tales that were vivid, dramatic and seldom verifiable. 

Adam presents his father's inventions as acts not of deceit, but a way of managing a reality Bryce found intolerable. He suggests Bryce’s storytelling was a method of holding himself together when facts felt insufficient, a way of creating an endurable version of life.

Prior to being a novelist, Bryce spent three decades in Sydney’s advertising world. A period defined by competition, bravado and constant reinvention. He produced iconic campaigns, clashed with strong personalities and lived a lifestyle that strained his marriage to Benita Solomon. 

Advertising rewarded performance and encouraged the blurring of the line between pitch and persona. As Bryce moved into fiction, those habits migrated. His protagonists often resembled idealised versions of himself, most notably Peekay in The Power of One. 

His public identity became a kind of ongoing presentation. 

Adam writes of this with restraint, describing a father who sought admiration in large quantity and often said whatever was required to secure it.

The memoir’s emotional core lies in its treatment of grief and distance. Bryce’s April Fool’s Day, written after the death of his youngest son Damon, remains one of the most openly vulnerable works in Australian publishing. He grieved publicly and many readers responded to the sincerity of that grief. 

Yet Adam describes a dad who remained unreachable to his surviving sons. The public vulnerability did not translate into private connection. Bryce could make readers feel seen yet struggled to extend this to those closest to him. 

Adam handles this contradiction without bitterness, his tone measured and grounded in reporting rather than recrimination. This absence of anger gives the memoir its strength.

The book also traces the long arc of Bryce’s personal life. His marriage to Benita collapses under the weight of his behaviour. His affairs create further distance within the family. His later marriage to Christine Gee, a near identical twin of one of his former partners, is described by Adam with a mix of detachment and quiet disbelief. 

Adam recalls attending the wedding, feeling like a stranger at an event that should have been intimate. That moment becomes emblematic of the emotional gap that had grown between father and son. 

Our author does not write as one seeking vindication, but an adult attempting to understand a man whose contradictions were too large to ignore and too human to condemn.

Throughout the memoir Adam maintains a disciplined approach, writing with a journalist’s habits of contextualising, verifying and resisting melodrama, and an historian’s patience for contradiction. 

The portrait that emerges is balanced, steady and gently affecting, acknowledging the complexities of loving someone whose strengths and weaknesses are often inseparable, while avoiding the easy binaries that dominate many celebrity‑adjacent memoirs.

My Father Bryce ultimately becomes a study of myth and affection coexisting within one family. It shows how a father can be generous and self‑absorbed, loving and unreachable, a national storyteller and a private fabulist. 

Adam Courtenay's memoir recognises how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can protect, distort and sometimes define us more completely than hard facts ever could. 

In reconstructing his father, he has done something Bryce himself rarely managed: told the truth without embellishment.

I loved this and found it way superior, nuanced and authentic to any of Bryce Courtenay's actual work!

Bravo!

My review of My Name Is Barbra, by Barbra Streisand

My Name Is Barbra

by Barbra Streisand

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

There are books that arrive like postcards from a life, and those that arrive like the life itself. This one is of the latter.

While some memoirs whisper and others confess, more strive to tidy a life into something manageable. My Name Is Barbra does none of these things, arriving as a grand, unapologetic declaration. Sprawling, unruly and unwilling to be pressed into margins.

A tome of nearly a thousand pages, from a woman who has spent her entire existence insisting on the right to be fully seen. A 992-page testimony of the ambition, artistry and sheer force of personality that carried her from a Brooklyn tenement to the summits of world entertainment.

The result feels less like a diary than a museum wing dedicated to a singular life.

Her story begins not with fame but with hunger, the kind that shapes a child before they know they are being shaped. The absence of a father, the chill of her mother’s indifference. These scenes read like old film stills, flickering with the ache of a life yet to find its platform. 

Her infamous perfectionism, control and refusal to bend to expectation, all trace back to these early years. She writes of these times with startling clarity. Her pain is not romanticised but simply remembered, as one remembers the cold of a winter morning long after the frost has melted.

As the journey moves into her ascent: clubs, auditions, the first glimmers of recognition, her voice becomes sharper and more luminous. She narrates her rise with the precision of one who has spent decades defending her choices and spent a lifetime fighting to be understood. 

Celebrity memoirs rarely feel genuinely authored. This one does. She writes about fame not as a coronation, but a shield. Art became the place she could be seen without being hurt.

It is a book that refuses modesty, abbreviation, or to be anything other than Barbra Streisand. This is not vanity, but preservation. A life lived in the spotlight must be archived before others rewrite it. 

Each chapter feels meticulously placed, each anecdote polished like a stone weighing down her pocket for decades. 

She writes not as a celebrity chasing nostalgia, but an archivist of her own experience, cataloguing camera angles, rehearsal tensions, contracts, wins and losses, all preserved like artifacts beneath glass.

For readers who value craft, the author walks us through the making of Funny Girl, Yentl, The Way We Were, and A Star Is Born with a level of detail bordering on the forensic. She guides us through the machinery of creation: the lighting, music and emotional calculus of every scene. 

Not content to just recount what happened, she wants us to understand how. The choices, battles, accidents and miracles.

The star confronts her reputation as a diva amid a whirl of irritation and clarification, humour and weary defiance, arguing that that her assertiveness has long been misread through gendered lenses. 

She knows the word has followed her like a shadow and she knows why: visionary men are tagged geniuses; visionary women are problems.

Her memoir becomes, in part, a reclamation project, a voice insisting on the right to define her own narrative after decades of being defined by others.

Is it long? Exhaustingly so. A doorstop with a pulse. But its length becomes part of its character, like the ornate spine of an old volume that refuses to be slimmed down for convenience. 

You don’t read this for efficiency; you read it to sit patiently as she tells you all she has ever wanted you to know. You don't read it quickly, you inhabit it.

She has lived a life at full blast, so tells it out loud accordingly. Her winding digressions, protracted parentheses, catalogues of furnishings, salads and wig fibres, become part of the charm.

A feast and a test of endurance, self‑mythology and self‑correction. A diva’s gospel and a woman’s reckoning. It is, above all, unmistakably Barbra: brilliant, controlling, funny, wounded yet triumphant.

It is rare to encounter a memoir where the craft is given as much reverence as the fame. Here, the craft is the fame.

In the end this feels like a well restored sepia photo: cracks still visible, colours still muted, but the subject unmistakably alive. An account of a woman who refused to dim her light for anyone.

As others have noted: if it's modesty you seek, you will not find it here. If it's Barbra, she's with you on every page.