If You Would Have Told Me: A Memoir

In this charming debut, Full House star Stamos reflects on fame and family. Cast in General Hospital at age 18 after failing to register for his first semester of business school, Stamos describes being in the public eye for his entire adulthood and the ways his parents tried to keep him grounded as his star rose—while Stamos shot his first seasons of the soap opera, his father insisted he continue covering the Sunday shift at the family diner in Orange County, Calif. After General Hospital, Stamos was recommended for the role of Uncle Jesse on Full House by director Garry Marshall. Here, Stamos complicates his suave, pretty-boy image with sincere and tender accounts of his painful divorce from actor Rebecca Romijn, struggles with sobriety, and grief over the deaths of his parents and Full House costar Bob Saget. There’s plenty of fun, too, as when Stamos recounts unwittingly wearing fetish gear to an early audition in a naive attempt to impress a casting director, or staying home to scrapbook a wedding gift for his fiancée while she was away at her bachelorette party. These anecdotes, plus passages about being starstruck while touring as the Beach Boys’ drummer, effectively humanize an actor often reduced to sex symbol status and reinforce his assertion that “fame and fortune is as fun as it is eventually empty; the simple stuff is the best stuff.” Readers will be enchanted. (Oct.)