

(For his 50th birthday, he bungee-jumped backward out of a helicopter above the Grand Canyon.) Witnessing this at age 9, Will determined heartbreakingly that he was a “coward” for not intervening - a self-characterization that echoes throughout this story and, he theorizes later, drove him to compensate by powering through fear. He once struck Smith’s mother, known as Mom-Mom - an office and then school administrator of her own considerable mettle - so hard she spit blood. It’s more like a wild ride than a journey, however, one whose most valuable insights are to be gleaned not on Instagram but in a pre-web world of suburban basements, cassette decks, network TV shows, fax machines, party lines and playing outside.ĭuring Smith’s childhood in the Wynnefield neighborhood of West Philadelphia, Daddio was a hard-drinking self-employed refrigeration engineer of militaristic discipline but erratic temper. From confusion to clarity.” A Fresh Prince of all media, Smith has so many “angels” to thank along this “journey,” he directs readers to his Instagram account rather than kill more trees with lengthy acknowledgments. The book is also intermittently a call to self-actualization: Written with Mark Manson, a mega-selling personal-growth author himself prone to profanity, it’s sprinkled with homilies like “Living is the journey from not knowing to knowing.

Titled simply “Will,” with all of that word’s felicitous double entendres of iron and resolve, Smith’s autobiography is indeed a fairy tale of dazzling good fortune - albeit one told by a narrator who admits by the second chapter that he is unreliable, a lifelong embellisher for whom “the border between fantasy and reality has always been thin and transparent.” His son, a rapper-turned-sitcom actor and now overnight matinee idol, is just the luckiest man he has ever met.

Then Daddio, piling on affectionate profanity, concedes he was wrong about being the creator of your own destiny, about success being the result of preparation meeting opportunity and all that. “Remember I told you! There’s no such thing as luck,” this man he calls Daddio reminds him several times. It’s his domineering father, calling from Philadelphia to crow about the boffo box office receipts. in Los Angeles, the telephone of its young star, Will Smith, jangles him awake. America has gasped en masse watching aliens detonate the White House in the movie “Independence Day” and, at 3 a.m.
