Before a single sentence about the book, the blurb on this audiobook says Brought to you by Penguin, then shouts NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER and SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER in capitals. The second of those is a British paper, which tells you the text was written for another market and pasted here without adjustment. Pageboy deserves better framing than sales furniture, and it gets it four lines later, once the actual writing starts and the tone changes completely.
Our Take on Pageboy
Byline and credit match, and for this particular memoir that is not a neutral fact. Pageboy is a book about being made to perform: the glossy young starlet role the copy says made his skin crawl, a career that turned from escape into nightmare, the silence held in front of powerful people in Hollywood. The person delivering all of it aloud, for eight hours and twenty-three minutes, is the person it happened to. An interpreter would have been an odd call here, and Penguin Audio declined to make it.
Three counted votes sit behind the 4.3 average, which leaves the total at thirteen of the fifteen on offer. Five written verdicts sit on that same page carrying twenty-four points between them. Those two figures cannot be describing the same people. Either the counter is broken or the written opinions were never counted at all, and nothing on the listing says which. The upshot is practical: the average is measuring a population you cannot see, so read the ones you can.
Two of the five reach independently for the same image without either of them mentioning the recording. Chad, in Australia, says the book reads like a conversation with a friend. The reader signing as 00, in Canada, says it reads like a person speaking to you. Two strangers, filing more than two years apart, describing the same quality in a printed edition. That is the closest anyone here comes to an argument for the audio, and neither of them knew they were making it.
Juno is the hinge and the copy knows it. Two months before the premiere, a first queer bar, and the question Can I kiss you left hanging in the air. Then the film lands, the fame arrives, and the escape hardens into the trap. That is a clean and genuinely dramatic structure, and it is the reason Pageboy has more shape than the average celebrity memoir, which tends to walk chronologically through a career and then stop.
Braden Pickering files the only grade under five and the only structural criticism anyone offers: the book is not entirely chronological. In print that is a mild complaint. In audio it becomes a real one, since you cannot thumb back twenty pages to work out when something happened. Listeners who need a timeline to hold onto should take that four-star note seriously, because it is the single most actionable sentence anywhere in this column.
Donna L, who opens by explaining that celebrity lives are not usually of any interest, supplies the most useful inventory of the contents: guilt, shame, toxic family relationships, denial, bullying, sexual harassment, and a body somebody was at war with from the beginning. Page does not hold back, that response says. The list is the book, and it is worth having in hand before you start, not discovered somewhere in the fourth hour.
What to Watch For in Pageboy
Structure is the first thing to watch, and Pickering named it correctly. Memoirs that move by association instead of by year reward attention and punish a distracted listen, and this one apparently moves that way. Eight hours is long enough for a reader to lose the thread and short enough that starting over is not painful. If you tend to listen in ten-minute fragments between other things, this is a book to save for longer stretches, when the associative jumps read as design instead of as confusion.
The jacket copy's own promise comes next. It calls Pageboy a love letter to the power of being seen, then lists secret love affairs, body image and familial strife, which is an unusually candid table of contents for marketing text. What it will not tell you is how exposed the writing gets. LadyOrange92 posts a Spoiler Alert before mentioning an eating disorder, in a memoir, which is its own quiet measure of how much of a life is on the table here.
Chad's response carries the release date itself, June 6, 2023, meaning somebody took this in the day it appeared and wrote up the same evening. The verdict in that entry is the broadest anyone offers: a book many queer people could have used while growing up. LadyOrange92 aims wider still, recommending it to trans readers, to allies, and explicitly to people hostile to the trans community. Whether that last group ever shows up is a separate question, but the thought was there.
Who Should Listen to Pageboy
Somebody signing as 00 wrote the strangest entry here and possibly the most moving. The response describes buying the book for a young person going through all this, watching it go unopened for a while, reading it instead, and being caught out by it. The writing is riddled with typos. It calls a memoir a novel. It also contains the single most useful observation anyone on this page makes about how these sentences behave out loud. Books do not always reach the reader they were bought for. Sometimes they reach the person who bought them, which is a fair account of what memoirs frequently do.
Listeners who came up queer and closeted, or who are close to somebody doing it right now, are the obvious audience, and the written responses say as much without prompting. It also suits listeners who want a famous life with an argument inside it, because Pageboy has one and states it. Film readers get the Juno chapters and the Hollywood material, which the copy is blunt about, describing criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in the industry.
Content is the deciding factor for most people. Disordered eating, sexual harassment, a hostile family, and years spent performing an identity, all told in the first person by the person who lived through it, across eight hours and twenty-three minutes with very little relief built in. Skip it if what you wanted was the glossy version of a famous life, because this listing and every reader who has left a word here agree that no glossy version exists.
