SHORT STORIES

It’s bad enough to find out your wife is cheating on you with your best friend on the set of the television show where you work. It’s even worse when your boss, Shonda Rhimes, has to spell it out for you. That’s exactly what happened to Short on the set of the hit show Scandal, where he was a series regular. He was so devastated by the reveal that he tried to walk into traffic; it was only through the intervention of his co-stars that he was prevented from doing so. The event was the climax of a series of ups and downs that had plagued the author throughout his life. He was born while his mother was awaiting trial for shooting and killing his father, a Kansas City police officer. “That might sound wild,” Short explains, “but you’d also have to know that my father was an extremely crooked cop. He ran in the streets, he had a drug ring, a prostitution ring….My mother was the good girl dating the bad guy, and eventually it caught up to her.” From his mother’s serial relationships to his own fraught romantic entanglements—exacerbated by substance abuse—the author’s troubled life didn’t keep him from achieving success. But it did threaten to destroy that success once he found it. Short’s prose is conversational and fluid, and he employs it in spinning just the sort of celebrity stories that readers expect. Here, he describes his advisory role in the career of Britney Spears: “ ‘Larry, hear me out,’ I told him. ‘Didn’t Britney just kiss Madonna at the MTV Awards?’ Obviously, the answer was yes. ‘Put Madonna on the record, and it’s gone. It’s out of here!’ ” The book moves quickly and demands little of readers. While hardly a life-altering read, Short’s work—written with Mendez—offers a good mix of show-business memoir, recovery narrative, and barroom-style yarns. By the end of it, it’s clear that he is grateful for the lessons learned, and readers will have at the very least been entertained.

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