Gray

Pete is a singer on tour with his band. He is trying to work out who he is, where he has been and what he has turned into. The book is a novel drawn heavily on the life of its author, Pete Wentz, bassist and founder of Fall Out Boy, who began by playing small venues outside Chicago.

On stage and in public, Pete is treated as an international sex symbol, and he swings between enjoying that attention and a hopelessness that settles in when he is alone. He worries that he is waiting to be found out. He is anxious, he self-medicates, and he expects to die a cliche.

His longtime ex-girlfriend dies, and he grieves hard and in all the wrong ways. Self-destruction follows, including an attempt to take his own life and a short stay in an institution. Death hangs over the pages as a constant threat, or perhaps a promise.

The narration is confessional and reflective. Pete looks back on memories such as a first kiss and a first fistfight, and he labels himself romance's last terrorist.

The questions he keeps returning to are what it means to have no home, what a person does once his one true love is gone, and why he cannot return to how things were. It is a dark, introspective portrait of life behind fame, and it deals openly with grief and suicide.