Book Review: A Better Me by Gary Barlow

I was always a bit too ‘young’ for Take That the first time round. The band split when I was in primary school, and I was much more interested in making up imaginary games than crying over a boyband. However, when they returned following a documentary in 2005, their music had evolved, I’d grown up, and it was the right side of pop for me to enjoy. 

Gary has always struck me as quite a private person. The driving force behind the original band in terms of musical direction and creativity, but not really someone who enjoys the fame - and indeed this really comes across here. Although we get snippets of deeply harrowing parts of Gary’s life from recent years, such as his obsession with food, his depression following the band’s initial breakdown and the deeply harrowing time in 2012 when he lost his baby Poppy to stillbirth, sometimes I still felt he was holding back. He doesn’t really give anything away that we, the public, don’t already know about and I think this is because he’s become wary over the years of giving too much of himself. Years of ridicule over your weight, your unsuccessful solo career when your band mate has become a global phenomenon, and just generally being seen as a laughing stock in the music industry for a while would be enough to make anyone quite closed off.

I particularly liked the stories about the various tours that Take That have done in recent years (from a personal perspective I went to see the Progress tour and it was nice to get an ‘inside look’ at what went into making such an enormous and enjoyable stadium production), and Gary’s side of the story with regards to mending bridges with Robbie. Again, I felt like a lot of this aspect is heavily edited. Gary mentions that this is just his ‘side’ of the story, but I felt there was a lot more to that little reunion than is mentioned, and Gary remains quite guarded about the subject throughout. 

There is hardly any mention of Take That from the 90’s other than a brief run down of how Gary joined the band, which was a little disappointing. Gary, again, mentions that it’s all be told before - but a part of me felt like this was a bit of a cop out to tell some really interesting stories about what went in back in the original haydays of the band. 

An interesting read if you like Gary and Take That, with some really emotional sections on stillbirth and the hopelessness and despair that brings. But it’s rather heavily edited by Gary himself.