Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Grand Central Publishing, and author Tim Curry for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

When I saw Tim Curry was writing his memoirs, I was excited. I’d been a teen in the late 1970s and early 1980s when The Rocky Horror Picture Show was quite popular, and followed his career afterwards. If there was one thing I could count on, it was that anything Curry appeared in would be interesting. He seemed to have a unique ability to pick films or projects that kept him from being typecast and brought a part of him to each role. As he states early on in Vagabond, once you’ve portrayed a transvestite vampire, there aren’t many roles that are similar to that.

I was prepared for a juicy memoir, but what I got was a very introspective book where Curry himself seems to look back and tries to understand some of the choices he made in his career. There’s little dishing on anyone. Curry refuses to discuss his personal life other than alluding to times he was in love or going through a breakup here and there, and he doesn’t name names. It was well-known that he was at least friends with Freddie Mercury (he designed the gardens at Mercury’s home), yet he doesn’t bring him up at all. There are a few celebs he doesn’t speak about as favorably as others, but the worst he seems to say is that working with someone was not memorable.

“I want Marla to meet Chris Columbus,” Trump said to me, “because Marla is a very talented actress.”

“I’m…sure she is,” I said, leaning fully into the conciliatory tone of a typical top-notch concierge. That wasn’t a complete lie; I have no doubt she was good at faking it.

– On filming Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

If you’re a fan of his role in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, he writes quite a lot about how that came to be and how he crafted this character that he took from the stage to the screen. Other roles are not as thoroughly explored. He writes a lot about his voice work, which I did find very interesting. He has a distinctive voice that I thought I would recognize; however, other than Nigel Thornberry, I didn’t know the extent to which he has contributed his voice to animation and video games. One of his favorite roles was playing Long John Silver in Muppets Treasure Island. I’ll have to revisit that one now, along with several other works of his.

Some memoirs that don’t address specific areas of a celebrity’s life can be quite boring. Vagabond is not. Despite the lack of gossip, I found his writing very interesting. Curry doesn’t seem to see himself as the larger-than-life personality that those of us who followed his career see him to be. He comes off more as a man who has seen and experienced more than his fair share in life and learned how to use those experiences to deepen the characters he portrayed. It’s more of a treatise on the acting profession than anything else, although he does write about the relationships with his family and others in his profession.

His insights into what life was like following his stroke are also interesting to read about. He was just getting to the point in his life where he was gaining an appreciation for the quiet things, such as restoring houses and working in the gardens, when it struck him. The house he owned at the time was not conducive to someone who had lost use of half of his body, and he was forced to move to a more accommodating location.

Although I would have appreciated a few more juicy details, Vagabond was a great memoir. I read through it rather quickly for this type of book. Curry is engaging and not egotistical at all, which helps while he’s discussing all of the roles he’s had on stage, screen, and behind the microphone. I really don’t know how he kept up the pace he did for so long. I’m the same age he was when he was performing eight shows a week in Spamalot, and there’s no way that I could do it.

People who are interested in Curry’s career, or the acting profession in general, will enjoy Vagabond. I know I did, even if it wasn’t what I was expecting. Curry is a good writer and has a remarkably good memory for someone who has had such a debilitating stroke. He apologizes when he can’t recall certain things. I found it remarkable that he remembered as many details as he did.