Quick Take
- Narration: Blair Underwood reads the main text and won the 2026 Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narrator, Richie himself delivers the introduction, a meaningful structural choice that grounds the memoir in the subject’s own voice before handing it to Underwood’s polished performance.
- Themes: Late-blooming talent and self-doubt, the Civil Rights era as formative context, love as both personal and universal force
- Mood: Warm, funny, and ultimately moving, the audio equivalent of a long dinner with someone who has lived extraordinarily well
- Verdict: Among the best celebrity memoirs in recent memory, and Underwood’s narration makes the audio version the definitive way to experience it.
I finished Truly on a Sunday afternoon when I had no particular reason to be sitting still, and I sat still for the last two hours anyway. Lionel Richie’s memoir had been on my list since its publication, filed under “eventually” the way books about people you already love sometimes are, the assumption being that you already know the broad strokes and can afford to wait. That assumption was wrong in every meaningful way.
The Kirkus starred review describes the book as functioning as “both a fun memoir and a love letter to music and his beloved Tuskegee,” and that dual register is exactly right and exactly why the audiobook works so well. This is not a celebrity retrospective in the conventional sense. It is a sustained argument, made through stories rather than thesis statements, that the specific place and specific moment where Richie grew up, a university town in Alabama during the Civil Rights movement, was not incidental to the artist he became but was its actual foundation.
The Tuskegee Years and Why They Matter
Richie’s childhood on the campus of Tuskegee University gives the memoir a setting that few celebrity autobiographies can match for historical richness. The campus, home of the Tuskegee Airmen and the Booker T. Washington legacy, was a specific kind of Black intellectual and cultural world, aspirational, disciplined, proud, and Richie grew up inside it during the years when the Civil Rights movement was redefining what Black American life could mean. He does not romanticize this. The memoir is specific about the tension between the campus’s protected, achievement-oriented culture and the world immediately outside its gates, and about how that tension shaped a young man who would eventually write songs heard by billions.
Blair Underwood’s narration is at its best in these early sections. His voice has a quality that Richie’s own introductory delivery establishes and then Underwood sustains, a warmth that is not soft, a confidence that is not performed. The structural choice of having Richie himself deliver the introduction before handing the memoir to Underwood was clearly deliberate: it gives the listener permission to trust Underwood’s voice as an extension of Richie’s own, rather than a replacement for it.
The Painfully Shy Late Bloomer Problem
One of the memoir’s recurring concerns is the gap between what Richie was in private, deeply shy, a mediocre saxophone player when he joined the Commodores, as reviewer Rick Spell notes with some delight, and what he became publicly. This is a subject that self-help publishing has saturated with reassuring generalizations, but Richie approaches it with enough specificity to make it interesting again. The question is not just how he overcame shyness but why the talent was always there and the confidence came so late and so unevenly.
The answer the memoir builds toward is about love, romantic love, yes, but more broadly the capacity to give and receive it that Richie presents as the actual engine of his best work. This is not the standard artist-on-their-art framing, which tends toward either technical analysis or mythologizing. It is something more personal and more useful: an account of what it costs emotionally to write songs that speak to universal human experience while navigating a private life that was often considerably messier than the songs implied.
The Commodores, Motown, and Two Billion People at the Olympics
The professional arc, from the Commodores to Motown to a solo career that culminated in an Olympic performance witnessed by two billion people, is documented with Richie’s characteristic blend of humor and humility. The memoir does not treat the career as an inevitability or as a series of clever strategic moves. It reads instead as a sequence of near-misses, lucky encounters, and decisions made under conditions of uncertainty, which is considerably more interesting than the cleaned-up narrative most celebrity memoirs prefer.
The “We Are the World” chapter earns its space in the memoir because Richie does not just describe what happened but interrogates what it meant and why the particular historical moment made it possible. The Harlem sections and the French Riviera culture shock episodes provide texture and humor that break up what could otherwise become a relentless succession of professional milestones.
What Blair Underwood Brings to the Audie-Winning Performance
Underwood won the 2026 Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narrator for this performance, and listening to the memoir it is easy to hear why. The award reflects not just technical competence but the specific challenge of narrating a living subject’s memoir, finding a voice that honors the subject’s identity without simply attempting imitation. Underwood brings his own considerable presence to the material without ever appearing to compete with the story. The comedic passages are genuinely funny in his reading. The passages about loss and failure carry weight without tipping into performance of grief. It is a disciplined and intelligent piece of work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Blair Underwood narrates most of the memoir, does the absence of Richie’s own voice for the main text affect the listening experience?
Less than you might expect. The structural choice of having Richie deliver the introduction grounds the listener in his actual voice before Underwood takes over, and Underwood’s performance is calibrated to the material rather than to mimicry. The Audie Award for Best Nonfiction Narrator reflects how successfully this arrangement works.
Does the memoir cover Richie’s role on American Idol and his current public profile, or does it focus primarily on the earlier career?
The synopsis confirms that the memoir extends through his current multi-generational fame as a judge on American Idol, so the chronological arc is comprehensive. Earlier periods, Tuskegee, the Commodores, the Motown years, the Olympic performance, receive more extended treatment, but the book is not limited to the classic career period.
Is the Civil Rights context integrated throughout or confined to the early chapters?
The Tuskegee and Civil Rights context is most explicit in the early chapters, but it functions as a formative lens throughout the memoir. Richie returns repeatedly to how his upbringing shaped his understanding of love, community, and the purpose of music, so the historical setting is never entirely background.
The Kirkus review is starred, does the memoir live up to that level of critical praise, or is there a gap between critical reception and listener experience?
Listener reviews align closely with the critical reception. Multiple reviewers independently describe the memoir as immediately recognizable as Richie’s voice and spirit even through Underwood’s narration, and the combination of humor, vulnerability, and warmth that Kirkus identified is consistently mentioned in listener responses.
